A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel Read online

  Nonsense of course. But while Lombroso was misled in attempting to explain criminality in relation to things like the size of a man’s nose, mouth and ears, subsequent neurological research has demonstrated that he wasn’t so very wide of the mark. When he laid open the skull of an Italian version of Jack the Ripper and perceived, on the internal occipital crest, a small hollow - a hollow which related to a still greater anomaly in the cerebellum (the hypertrophy of the vermis) and to which he later ascribed the propensity to degenerate criminality, he was onto more than even he could have realised.

  Of course, Lombroso had still not grasped that the real pointer towards a man’s criminal tendencies lay not on the surface of the skull, but on the surface of the brain. What a pity he got sidetracked with all that nonsense about the habitual criminal’s earlobes.

  As it happens my own earlobes are large and Lombroso (the first one) would very possibly have classed me as the criminal type. It’s perhaps just as well that no one can tell what’s going on inside your head. That is no one except the second Lombroso. And this is a kind of tautology.

  3

  JAKE’S HOTEL, AT least the exterior, reminded her of a detention centre she had once visited in Los Angeles. Outside, there was only a doorman and a taxi-rank to remind you that it was a hotel at all. She would not have been surprised to see a machine-gun nest on top of the knot of the bowtie-shaped building.

  She went into the bar and sat up at the counter, ordering a whisky sour and twenty Nicofree, and munching a handful of pistachio nuts while the pale-faced barman unwrapped the cigarettes for her. He lit her silently and then set about mixing her drink.

  Jake glanced over her shoulder and checked the room, careful not to make eye-contact with any of the lonelyhearts business travellers who, seeing an attractive single woman, might think they could get lucky with her.

  Like the interior of an expensive German car, the hotel bar had a relentless, almost Spartan modernity about it. Charcoal-grey carpet covered the floor and the walls up to the sills of the toughened tinted windows. The black leather seats might have met with a chiropractor’s approval but were hardly relaxing to sit in. The handsome, polished walnut counter displayed a variety of small screens informing guests, at the flick of a cue-button, of everything from the bar-tariff to the evening’s programme of films on cable in the hotel bedrooms.

  Jake turned back to face the sharpshooter’s array of bottles behind the bar and fetched her drink off the counter, trying to ignore the hopeful who was already standing next to her in his smooth Italian suit.

  ‘Is anyone sitting here?’ he asked, in halting German.

  ‘Nobody but the Lord,’ she replied with greater fluency. She fixed the man with a smug beatific smile of the kind she had seen deployed by the most sickly sweet televangelists.

  ‘Tell me, friend,’ she asked him quickly. ‘Are you saved?’

  The man hesitated, his confidence fading fast in the face of this apparent display of religious zeal.

  ‘Er, no ...’

  Jake smiled to herself as she reviewed his likely thought processes. How lucky could a man get with a woman who seemed interested only in the state of his immortal soul?

  ‘Some other time perhaps,’ said the man, retreating.

  ‘There’s always time for Jesus,’ Jake remarked, her eyes widening like a madwoman’s. But he was gone.

  Jake sipped her drink and laughed. The missionary routine: it never failed. She was an old hand at drinking alone in bars. Unwanted male approaches (and for Jake, all male approaches were unwelcome) seemed no more of an irritation than mosquitoes for some hardened South American explorer: easily swatted and, after a while, you got used to them. She knew that she could have avoided them altogether if she had only frequented lesbian bars. If only things had been that simple.

  ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ He was an American and naturally assumed that the whole world could speak English.

  Jake, who spoke good German, flirted with the idea of pretending to speak not a word of English and then rejected it: she knew that when a man wanted to get into a girl’s pants, conversation could count for very little.

  ‘I don’t know whether you can or you can’t,’ she said dully.

  ‘What?’ said the man, wincing.

  Jake took a square look at him. Short-haired, fresh-faced, he seemed to be not much older than his collar-size. If he had appeared a little more intelligent, she told herself, she might have fucked him.

  ‘Yes, it is hot.’

  The young American smiled bitterly. ‘What is your problem?’

  ‘Right now it’s that aftershave, sonny.’ Jake shifted on her stool. ‘Run along before it affects my contact lenses.’

  The American’s face took on a nasty look. His lips pursed several times before he thought of something to say back to her.

  ‘Ball breaker,’ he snarled and then stalked away.

  Jake snorted with contempt, although she knew that was what she was: that and a bit more. She could almost have been lesbian except that she hadn’t much liked it when she tried it. Faith, a lesbian friend at Cambridge, had once told her that Jake’s sexuality reminded her of something Jeremy Bentham had said about John Stuart Mill: he rather hated the ruling few than loved the suffering many. It wasn’t, Faith had said, that Jake loved women but that she hated men.

  Her hatred of men was every bit as intense as aversions to heights, open spaces, and spiders were for other people; and it had been learned in much the same way as a rat is conditioned to press a lever in order to avoid an electric shock.

  The instrument of her own aversive conditioning, a term with which she became familiar when she studied natural sciences at Cambridge, was less direct than electricity, and left no visible scar tissue; but the particular stimulus produced an effect that was just as painful as anything that might have been inflicted with a couple of strategically-placed electrodes; and while the injuries may have been invisible, they felt just as permanent as if they had been burnt into her naked flesh.

  An ungrateful child was no match for the venom in the cerebro-spinal needle of a father’s hatred.

  She finished her drink and ordered another. The barman mixed it quickly as if he had learned his trade in the pits at the Indianapolis 500. But there was nothing wrong with the way it tasted and Jake nodded appreciatively at him.

  She glanced at her wristwatch. Before she went to bed she ought to read the information file Gilmour had given to her. There wasn’t much to stay in the bar for. Easy to see why Frankfurt was host to so many international trade fairs and conferences, she thought. It was the kind of city with absolutely no distractions: no nightlife, no scenery to speak of, no historical buildings, no theatres, no decent cinemas. About the most interesting place she had seen was Frankfurt airport. She finished her drink, signed the bill and then went out to the lobby.

  The lift arrived in a rush of air and Jake stepped in. She told the computer the floor number and watched the doors close. They were not quite quick enough to prevent the young American who had talked to her at the bar from squeezing his way into Jake’s lift at the last second.

  ‘You should be more friendly,’ he said, and touched her breast.

  Jake smiled, the better to catch him off his guard. She was still smiling as she raked his shin with the side of her shoe. The man yelled and clutched instinctively at his injured leg. Which left him leaning nicely into the smart uppercut that was already rising like a piston towards the point of his chin. It was all over in a few seconds. The lift door was opening at Jake’s floor and she was rubbing her knuckles and stepping over the American’s supine body.

  ‘Ground floor,’ she said to the computer and walked onto the landing, the lift doors closing silently behind her. The hotel corridor was as long as an autobahn. She hoped to be back in her room before the man recovered himself and made it back up from the lobby. Outside the door of her room she stopped and fumbled in her bag for her key. Then she remembered there was no key. Th
e door was voice-print activated.

  ‘Jakowicz,’ she said, and the door sprang open.

  Halogen light escaping from the four enormous glass parapets which dominated the top of the hotel’s two wings poured through the embrasure-sized window like a cinema projection. Jake lit a cigarette, nicotine free, but the smoke felt good in her lungs, and picked up her PC and inserted Gilmour’s information disk.

  PROPERTY OF METROPOLITAN POLICE INFORMATION DEPARTMENT. DISK LMP/2000/LOMBROSO PROGRAM/GENERAL FILE.

  MENU1. WHAT IS LOMBROSO?

  2. BACKGROUND TO LOMBROSO:a. FAILURE OF PREVENTION STRATEGIES FOR VIOLENT CRIME.

  b. SOCIAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND.

  3. SOMATOGENIC DETERMINANTS OF VIOLENT CRIME.

  4. IMPLEMENTATION.

  5. TREATMENT AND INTEGRATION.

  PRESS ‘RETURN’ TO RUN INFORMATION BRIEF IN NUMERICAL ORDER.

  When she had read the menu she pressed the ‘Return’ key as instructed.

  1. WHAT IS LOMBROSO?

  L.O.M.B.R.O.S.O. stands for Localisation of Medullar Brain Resonations Obliging Social Orthopraxy. A machine based on the old Proton Emission Tomographer, and developed by Professor Burgess Phelan of the Nuffield Science Institute at Cambridge University, is able to determine those males whose brains lack a Ventro Medial Nucleus (VMN) which acts as an inhibitor to the Sexually Dimorphic Nucleus (SDN), a preoptic area of the male human brain which is the repository of male aggressive response. A computerised national survey of British males was started in 2010 with the aim of offering therapy, and/or counselling, to those who have been tested VMN-NEGATIVE. While the Lombroso computer’s program first decretal protects with a codename the identity of those who have tested VMN-negative, the computer is, however, linked with the central police computer at Kidlington: should the name of a suspect fed into the police computer within the course of an inquiry into a violent crime be that of a male who has tested VMN-negative, the Lombroso computer will inform the CPC of this fact. The very fact of being VMN-negative is, however, not admissible in criminal evidence. During the 2 years that the Lombroso Program has been in operation, over 4 million men have been scanned and of these, 0.003 per cent have been discovered to be VMN-negative. Of these, only 30 per cent were in prison or had some kind of a criminal record. At the time of writing, the Lombroso Program has been instrumental in the apprehension of 10 murderers.

  Jake read this first section of the information program, yawned and then went to the window of her hotel room. In the distance she could see the Main River which was the same washed-out colour of grey as the sky. A barge the size of a high street hooted as it made its slow, smooth way across the riverscape. She didn’t care for Frankfurt anymore than she cared to spend her evening reading about crime prevention strategies. The truth was that Jake had little faith in any of these. She saw it all as a great waste of money when criminal investigation was still comparatively under-resourced.

  Thoroughly distracted now, she turned the Nicamvideo set on and flicked through the 42 cable-channels. Her German was good but there were no programmes that seemed to make it worth the trouble of listening. Briefly she found herself detained with a sex film in which a couple were taking a bath together. The girl reminded her of Grace Miles: a strong, athletic-looking black woman with large breasts and a behind like a well-stuffed haversack. But when she started to suck the man’s cock with all the languorous concentration of a child eating an ice-cream, Jake wrinkled her lip with distaste and turned the set off.

  Could they actually imagine that a woman enjoyed doing that kind of thing? She shrugged. Perhaps they just didn’t care.

  She lit another Nicofree and returned reluctantly to her PC to read the rest of the information disk.

  2. BACKGROUND TO LOMBROSO:

  a. FAILURE OF PREVENTION STRATEGIES FOR VIOLENT CRIME.

  During the last two decades of the twentieth century, British society sought to control whole groups, populations and environments. The emphasis was not so much on community control as on control of communities. Technology and resources were directed towards surveillance, prevention and control, rather than ‘tracking’ the individual adjudicated offender. The thinking was to manipulate the external environment to prevent the initial infraction. The community continued to be involved but the reality was rather less comfortable. Fortress-living, armed guards patrolling schools and airports were simultaneously solutions and problems: problems in that they were helping to create the urban nightmares which caused people to revolt against their physical environments.

  With the failure of schemes which aimed to ameliorate the environment, the accent returned to tracking the individual offender. The adoption in 1997, following mass-immigration to the EC of Hong Kong Chinese refugees, of an EC national identity card scheme enjoyed considerable success. This was made even more effective when the ID card was able to include DNA-Profiling. As a result, and for the first time ever, the machinery was now in place which enabled Government to track the individual before he offended at all.

  b. SOCIAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND.

  The 1990s witnessed the discrediting of socially and economically fatalistic theories of why people commit violent crime. Attending only to the exterior causes of crime diminished any sense of personal responsibility. Today society no longer takes exclusive blame for how a person became a criminal any more than the individual himself: a combination of social and individual factors is seen as a better way to account for every kind of criminal behaviour.

  Determinism is not considered to constitute a menace to freedom in the new century. A pragmatic assumption of order made for the sake of advancing scientific enquiry can hardly be questioned. This reverses an earlier trend in the social sciences which mistakenly sought to protect freedoms by confining determinism to the physical world, thus effectively ‘outlawing’ all attempts at establishing some kind of ‘biological determinism’.

  Modern social science does not consider predictability and generalisation to be dangerous. Indeed, any advance in social science without first establishing certain notions about human behaviour would not have been possible. To claim infinite adaptability for human behaviour is no longer valid. Thus the concept that violent criminality has no real roots in us, being an external socially-produced phenomenon, is now wholly discredited.

  3. SOMATOGENIC DETERMINANTS OF VIOLENT CRIME.

  The last ten years has seen enormous advances made in the science of somatogenics, and in particular the aetiology of most mental disorders (with the exception of conversion disorders, such as neurosis). It is now accepted that most mental illness has some organic cause. There has occurred a similar revolution in what is known about organic pathology and its relation to violent crime.

  Neurological research has centred on sexual dimorphism, that is, the difference between male and female brains. Leading this field was Professor Burgess Phelan of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology in the University of Cambridge, and director of the Laboratory of Neuro-Endocrinology at the London Brain Research Institute.

  Phelan’s work followed the discovery, by a UCLA scientist, in the preoptic area of the male rat, of what became known as the Sexually Dimorphic Nucleus (SDN). This area, which helped direct sexual behaviour, was five times larger in male rats than in females. Yet another area of the rat brain that showed difference in size according to sex was the Ventro Medial Nucleus (VMN), associated with both eating and aggression. It was discovered that amputation or even a small lesion of a rat’s VMN made the male rat extraordinarily aggressive. But a similar lesion in the VMN of the female rat did not affect it at all.

  Using surgical brain atlases and the brains of volunteer male convicts, Burgess Phelan discovered an SDN and a VMN in the human brain. That like rats, the human male’s SDN was several times larger than a female’s. He also discovered that in human males, the VMN acted as an inhibitor to male aggression; that if the SDN was removed, the man was not aggressive at all; but that otherwise the absence
or amputation of the VMN made the male, like the rat, more aggressive. Equally, aggression in human females, with smaller SDNs, was not affected by the absence or amputation of the VMN.

  The results of Phelan’s research were taken up by Professor David Gleitmann, of the Department of Forensic Neuro-endocrinology at the London Brain Research Institute. He discovered that some violent criminals had no VMN at all; that they were VMN-negative.

  Originally this important discovery was made surgically. However, a breakthrough in the technology of Proton Emission Tomography, the so-called PET scan, enabled Gleitmann to take detailed colour photographs of the brain inside living human skulls. With these pictures Gleitmann was able to establish, within a matter of a few minutes, the presence or absence of a VMN and, as a corollary, latent criminality.

  Professor Gleitmann’s research has so far revealed that violent criminality in the VMN-negative subject may always remain merely latent. Current scientific investigation centres on the possibility that many men who are VMN-negative somehow manage to stabilise their own levels of aggression by producing an increased quantity of oestrogen.

  4. IMPLEMENTATION.

  In 2005, the average cost in the EC of a murder investigation was an EC$ 750,000. The same year there were some 3500 homicides, representing an investigative cost to the Community of EC$ 2.6 billion. In an attempt to try and reduce this staggering cost it was decided by the Europarliament to adopt Professor Gleitmann’s research within the context of an experimental program to be undertaken in one member country. Because of its higher than average record of violent crime, the UK was chosen and in 2011 the experiment began in the shape of the Lombroso Program.