Footsucker

by Geoff Nicholson

  I didn’t want to watch, but it was hard to look away. The transparencies changed rapidly as Catherine and Kramer changed position, changed places: and, precisely as if I was looking at a pornographic magazine, I found it strangely easy to blot out the images of limbs and bodies, faces and genitals, and focus simply on Catherine’s feet. They were as magnificent as ever. I felt terrible about it but I soon found myself getting aroused again. I couldn’t face it. I stood up and confronted Kramer. ‘This is stupid,’ I said. ‘You’ve got Catherine. You’ve humiliated me. Isn’t that enough for you?’

  I think more than anything else that must have surprised and confused him. He moved as though to threaten me again, but he was half-hearted about it now. I’d had enough and I felt that he had too. I walked away, turning my back on him. I knew there was a possibility he might hit me from behind, but I calculated that he wouldn’t. I left the studio, left the building, convinced myself that he wasn’t following me, and went back to my car.

  I felt my face, tried to look at it in the rear-view mirror. It was wet with blood and dirt but nothing felt as if it was broken. I knew I was lucky. I could have been beaten to a pulp or I could have been handed over to the police as a burglar. I had good reason to feel relieved, but in fact I felt ashamed, disgusted, and I also felt truly sorry for myself. I needed a bit of sympathy so I headed for the only place where I thought I had any conceivable hopes of receiving a welcome: Harold Wilmer’s shop.

  Twenty-three

  Harold’s shop was locked up, and there were no lights on inside. The window looked strangely empty as though he had given up trying to attract custom. However, there were lights on in his flat upstairs. I pressed the doorbell but at first there was no answer; perhaps Harold was used to passing drunks ringing it in the middle of the night. But I persisted, made it plain that I wasn’t going away, and eventually a curtain was pulled back and Harold’s face appeared. He looked down at me, neither surprised nor pleased to see me, having no sense of urgency nor of my need. It took him a long time to shamble down the stairs and open the door.

  ‘Yes?’ he said, as though he was confronting a man peddling religious tracts, but then he saw the blood on my face and my wounded looks and he let me in.

  ‘I’m sorry to arrive like this,’ I said. ‘I didn’t have anywhere else to go.’

  I had never been inside Harold’s flat before and I imagined it would be some dark labyrinth of a place. In the event it was just a small, old man’s flat, full of big heavy furniture that he had to squeeze past or climb over in order to move around the room. There was a carpet that might not have been vacuumed in years, and dust was spread thickly and evenly over every horizontal surface. But there was nothing particularly odd or eccentric about any of it, and there was no display of his handiwork, no covert stash of exotic shoes.

  However, two things caught my eye. First, I noticed a framed photograph that sat on the mantelpiece above the hissing gas fire. It was a snapshot of a plump-cheeked, open-faced young woman. Harold saw me looking and said, ‘Yes, that’s Ruth.’

  I was surprised. She was not as I’d imagined her and she did not look like anybody’s idea of a prostitute. It was hard to believe that the wholesome-looking woman in the photograph had strutted through alien bedrooms, touching strangers, being paid for sex, wearing shoes Harold had made for her. Her face looked neither sexual nor knowing, but perhaps there were other faces that she kept for professional purposes.

  The other thing that leapt out at me was a cast of Catherine’s right foot that rested on the sideboard in the yellow glow of a table lamp. It was marked with grubby fingerprints, and I wondered what use Harold had for it and what had happened to the other one.

  I sat down in a furrowed armchair and continued to feel sorry for myself while Harold poured me a small brandy and fetched a damp cloth to wipe the mess off my face.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Harold asked as he too sat down, but he didn’t sound very interested.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ I said, and with some guilt I described my bad times with Alicia, with my ugly-footed women, with the man from the ICA. Most shameful of all, I admitted that I had smashed the plaster casts of Catherine’s feet. Harold listened and I confessed. I wanted him to be shocked and disapproving. I wanted him to tell me how stupid and wrong I’d been, but he wouldn’t give me that satisfaction. He just nodded from time to time, as though everything I was confessing to was par for the course. But so far I’d said nothing about my encounter with Kramer.

  ‘I feel such a fraud compared to you, Harold,’ I said. ‘I feel that my behaviour isn’t justified. I shouldn’t be going off the rails like this. I mean, all that’s happened is I’ve been dumped by my girlfriend, whereas you …’

  I couldn’t finish my sentence. Harold looked as though his features had been set in cement. I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know.

  ‘None of this explains the blood on your face,’ he said.

  So I told him all about Kramer, about my break-in, about the pictures of Catherine’s feet and, for the first time, he seemed to get interested.

  ‘That’s a strange one, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘That he’s as obsessed with Catherine’s feet as you are. I wonder why. I wonder if she sought him out deliberately. Maybe you’ve given her a taste for it.’

  ‘Am I supposed to feel good about that?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  I took the few transparencies I’d slipped into my pockets and showed them to Harold. He held them up to the light, peered closely, but didn’t seem very impressed.

  ‘Do you think he’s called the police?’ Harold asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘But he knows who you are.’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘He’ll tell Catherine, no doubt.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘This is no way to get her back, is it?’ said Harold sadly.

  ‘No,’ I agreed.

  ‘So what are you going to do now?’

  ‘Sit here for a while. Go home. Get drunk. Get some sleep.’

  ‘I mean, what are you going to do about Kramer?’

  ‘What can I do? It’s over with. I probably got what I deserved.’

  Harold gave a strange little laugh, somewhat like a hiccup, somewhat like a whoop of delight. ‘How about getting some revenge?’ he said.

  ‘Like what?’

  He reached over and picked up the photograph of Ruth and stared at it, as though he was looking right through it, peering into another world.

  He said, ‘You know, above all else, beyond all the other feelings I have, I’m chiefly very angry about Ruth’s death. Still. Perhaps more now than ever. And for a long time I tried to focus that anger. I wanted her death to be somebody’s fault. And it might have been possible to blame the doctors, or our polluted environment, or even to blame God, but in reality Ruth died of what we have to call natural causes, and being angry with nature is as absurd as it is futile.

  ‘I used to wish that a drunken driver had killed her, or a sex murderer, maybe one of her clients, because then there would have been someone to blame, someone to be angry with, someone to take revenge on. And I’m absolutely sure I’d have taken that revenge. I’d very happily have killed Ruth’s killer.’

  He was as cold and as serious as I had ever seen him. He undoubtedly believed what he was saying but I wasn’t at all sure that I did. I’ve no doubt that most of us are capable of murder in certain specific circumstances, but it was still impossible to think of mild little Harold Wilmer as any sort of killer.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said apologetically. ‘I know my loss can’t possibly be in the same league as yours.’

  ‘Not true,’ he replied. ‘For you things are actually much harder. You’re angry because Catherine’s gone. You want her back but you’re angry with her. She’s both the cause and the object of your anger. You’re so angry with her you could kill her, but if you killed her you wouldn’t have her at a
ll and could never have her again. I can see it’s a difficult situation.’

  ‘Hey, steady on, Harold. I haven’t the slightest urge to kill Catherine.’

  ‘No? But you do need a focus for all that anger, don’t you? I always said you did. And Kramer fits the bill nicely.’

  It made some sort of sense.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘You could be right. Maybe that’s why I broke into his place, because I was angry and wanted to destroy something.’

  ‘But you found the photographs of Catherine’s feet and that made you angrier still, I’d guess.’

  I wasn’t sure that they’d made me angry exactly, and sitting there in Harold’s armchair, I didn’t feel angry at all. I felt lost, pathetic, trivial. I didn’t say that to Harold. It would have been letting him down. If he wanted to play at being an amateur psychologist, if he wanted to think I was trying to come to terms with my anger, I had no urge to argue.

  ‘But,’ said Harold, ‘then Kramer caught you and humiliated you. At this very moment, you probably feel as though you want to kill Kramer.’

  ‘No,’ I protested again. ‘I don’t have the slightest urge to kill Kramer, either.’

  Harold was starting to worry me. I’d never seen him like this. These casual, literal references to killing weren’t in character with the man I thought I knew. He looked at the photograph of Ruth again, then at me. I felt he was trying to see what I was made of whether I was quality merchandise, whether I was good enough for whatever he had in mind. I knew I wasn’t.

  ‘No, perhaps you couldn’t kill Kramer,’ he conceded. ‘But I could.’

  Later that night he did.

  Twenty-four

  It was only a small item in the newspaper, the ‘In Brief’ column, hemmed in between an arson attack on a school for the blind and a paragraph about two road builders who’d raped a male hitchhiker. It said,

  Mr Robert Kramer, a professional photographer, was found dead in his studio by cleaners this morning. Police say they are keeping an open mind about the cause of death and are anxious to interview friends and colleagues.

  Horror and disbelief tumbled over each other in me. I read the item again. It wasn’t enough. I wanted details, a full report, descriptions of the body and the scene of the crime, all the available data about the time and means of death. I wanted to know what goes through a policeman’s ‘open mind’.

  I didn’t want to believe it had anything to do with Harold. I hoped it was just a dreadful coincidence, and yet, given the way he’d talked that night, it was all too easy to believe it. I phoned his shop. It was a long time before he answered.

  ‘Kramer’s dead,’ I blurted.

  ‘Who?’ said Harold.

  ‘Come on, Harold, you know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘I don’t think I do,’ he said.

  It occurred to me that maybe the police were already there, that they were listening in on the conversation, hence his reticence.

  ‘Is there somebody there?’ I asked.

  ‘Nobody here but me.’

  ‘Harold, what do you know about Kramer?’

  ‘I know nothing about anyone of that name.’

  ‘What are you playing at, Harold? I can’t believe you’re acting like this. Were you there? Did you …?’

  I couldn’t bring myself to ask directly whether Harold had committed a murder. Some ludicrous sense of propriety was still in place.

  ‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Harold replied.

  ‘I don’t want to believe you did it,’ I said.

  ‘Nobody’s asking you to,’ Harold said flatly. ‘How could anyone think I killed a man I’ve neither met nor heard of.’

  ‘What are you saying, Harold?’

  ‘It might be better if we didn’t talk for a while,’ he said. ‘Not that we’ve had much in common since Catherine stopped seeing you.’

  That was when I truly realized that Catherine’s absence meant as much to Harold as it did to me. If Harold had killed Kramer, and I still hoped to God that he hadn’t, he might like to pretend he’d done it as a favour to me, but it appeared now that he had pressing reasons of his own. It seemed to me that Kramer had taken Catherine away from Harold just as surely as he’d taken her away from me.

  ‘I’ll be going away for a little while,’ Harold continued. ‘Doing a bit of travelling. Going abroad.’

  ‘That’s as good as admitting that you did it,’ I said.

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘It’s probably better if you don’t know that.’

  ‘What if I need to contact you?’

  ‘You’ll have no reason to contact me.’

  ‘I should go to the police about this,’ I said.

  ‘I think that wouldn’t be very clever of you,’ said Harold. ‘What would you tell them? That Harold Wilmer, a sad old shoemaker, got it into his head to kill a man? They’ll ask how you know, and you’ll have to tell them you were there, that the man stole your girlfriend, that you broke into his flat, that you had a fight. Not very clever at all.’

  ‘Harold, I can’t believe this.’

  ‘You don’t need to believe anything. All right? Just get on with your life, as I intend to. I’m going now. Goodbye.’

  He put the phone down on me and when I immediately called back the line rang without being answered. I ran out of my house, into my car and drove to the shop. It wasn’t a quick drive at the best of times and the traffic was terrible. By the time I got there I wasn’t at all surprised to find that he’d gone. The shop was empty and locked. I pounded on the door until a couple of passers-by stopped and asked me what I wanted. I said nothing. I got in my car, put my foot down and drove. I didn’t know where I was going. Maybe I was heading for Heathrow, maybe I was driving around in the hope of seeing Harold wandering the streets, or in a taxi, making his getaway, leaving the scene of the crime, but it wasn’t long before I abandoned that absurd enterprise. Harold had gone. Harold Wilmer, the mild-mannered, murderous shoemaker, had done a very successful disappearing act.

  Over the next couple of weeks I spent a lot of time combing the newspapers, looking for some follow-up piece, a report on the inquest, an announcement that a full-scale murder investigation had started, or alternatively that Kramer’s death had been declared an accident or suicide. But I found nothing. What was I to do? I couldn’t call the police and ask how they were getting on. All I could do was try to get on with my life and hope that no news was good news.

  Of course, I tried to phone Catherine. It seemed to me that her command not to phone her meant nothing now that Kramer was dead. Not that it mattered anyway. I phoned but there was only the sound of a disconnected line. I went to her flat and got no reply on her bell, so I pressed a lot of the others, pretending I was the postman. People are very gullible. I eventually spoke through the entryphone to a neighbour, a trusting old lady, who told me that Catherine had moved out. I asked how long ago. Oh, maybe a couple of weeks. Had she left a forwarding address? No, but the neighbour had a feeling she might have gone back to America. Where, I asked. What city? What state? Could she even tell me north, south, east, or west? By now the neighbour had worked out that I wasn’t really the postman and put down her phone.

  I was frustrated but I saw how it might be for the best. If Catherine had really left a couple of weeks ago then perhaps she wasn’t even aware that Kramer was dead. I don’t know why that pleased me so much.

  I did find it strange that Catherine and Harold should both disappear at the same time, and for the briefest moment it occurred to me that they might possibly have gone away together. But, no, that made no sense at all. It had to be nothing more than coincidence.

  Kramer’s death straightened me out a lot. I no longer wallowed in the misery of Catherine’s departure. Neither did I go around visiting prostitutes, picking up women, going to seminars on fetishism. I did my very best to lead a quiet, blameless life. It was dull stuff. It would have been
nice to meet up with Mike and Natasha, but I was staying out of that one for the moment. Of course, I still had my archive and that remained a source of occasional pleasure, but whereas it had been a fluid, growing collection it now became fixed and static. I thought it safest not to add to it; no more interviewing in the street, no more snatched photographs, no more stolen shoes. I was trying not to act suspiciously. I was acting like a criminal, albeit a reformed one.

  I was still occasionally tempted to go to the police. Yes, I would have had to confess to the break-in and to the fight with Kramer, but wouldn’t the mere fact of making a confession prove that I wasn’t the murderer? Well no, I could see that was a game of double and triple bluff, and would prove nothing. But wouldn’t my sheer innocence stand out? Surely the police would be able to tell I wasn’t the murderous type. But no, I didn’t believe that either. Innocent people are sometimes found guilty. People go to jail on the basis of far skimpier evidence than that against me. The chances of them catching Harold, believing and proving that he was the real killer, seemed slim. If the police were looking for a convenient hook on which to hang this murder I’d do just fine.

  Then, one night, a stranger came to my door and I knew straight away he was police. In a curious way I was relieved. I knew it had to happen sooner or later. He was young and big, his blond hair was cropped to a post-harvest stubble and his clothes were too tight round his arms and thighs. The pint had been forced into a grey double-breasted half-pint suit.

  ‘I wonder if I can waste a couple of minutes of your time,’ he said in a surprisingly easy tone.

  ‘I am sort of busy,’ I replied, only too willing to put him off if he could be put off that easily.