Footsucker

by Geoff Nicholson

  But then he flashed his badge and looked as though he meant business. I didn’t hear what rank he was, not that it would have meant anything to me, but I caught the name Crawford and it was obvious that he was going to come in, invited or not.

  ‘This won’t take long,’ he said as he clumsily pushed past me into the hall. ‘Don’t worry. It’s about someone and something you probably don’t know anything about.’

  For a moment I thought perhaps this visit had nothing at all to do with Kramer, that perhaps it was about stolen cars or the local neighbourhood watch. We walked into the living room and he sat down on the sofa, sprawled a little and blatantly looked round.

  ‘You live on your own, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I knew it. You can always tell. It’s something to do with the room lacking a woman’s touch. You ever been married?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you’ve got a girlfriend?’

  ‘Not at the moment, no.’

  I must have sounded overdefensive, though what was I defending myself against? Unspecified charges of sexual inadequacy? He saw me looking troubled and he slapped on a tight smile and waved a hand as if to say not to worry, it was all right by him, that wasn’t what he was here for, though he didn’t altogether convince me. He resumed his inspection of my décor.

  ‘It doesn’t look like a queer’s room either.’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t,’ I said.

  ‘No. I know that you do have girlfriends. I know that you went out with Catherine for instance.’

  ‘You’re well informed,’ I said.

  ‘Not as well as I’d like to be. Anyway, you and Catherine didn’t last very long. Right?’

  Things were happening too fast. Nothing was quite sinking in. I wanted to ask him who’d told him about me and Catherine, and whether he knew where she was, how I could get in contact with her, but that would have sounded desperate. I was too busy thinking this through to answer his question, but he waited for me.

  ‘Didn’t last long,’ he repeated.

  ‘Not long enough, no,’ I said.

  ‘Well, length isn’t everything.’

  It felt like he was testing me. Was I the kind of man who laughed at oblique jokes about penis length? On this occasion I wasn’t. I pretended not to realize that he was joking, so he gave a laugh that was long, loud and dirty enough for both of us.

  ‘Would you describe it as a casual relationship?’ he asked when he’d finished laughing.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t.’

  ‘So it was a short-lived but intense affair?’

  ‘If you like, yes. Look, is this about Catherine? You said it was about someone I probably didn’t know.’

  ‘I’m gathering background, all right? So why did you split up?’

  ‘Is this really relevant?’

  ‘Obviously,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be arsing around asking you irrelevant questions, would I, sir? Why did you split up?’

  ‘You’d have to ask her. It wasn’t my decision.’

  ‘We would if we knew where she was, but we don’t, and I assume you don’t either.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said, and at that moment I was extremely glad I didn’t know. Having to tell this man her whereabouts would have been an act of terrible betrayal.

  ‘You don’t mind helping me like this, do you?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘No, but if it’s about Catherine …’

  ‘It’s about someone called Robert Kramer. He was Catherine’s bloke after you. Your replacement.’

  ‘Is he in trouble?’ I asked, hoping I didn’t sound quite as transparent as I felt.

  ‘Well, he’s dead, isn’t he? No trouble for him, quite a lot of trouble for me. I’m surprised you didn’t see it in the paper.’

  ‘Why should I? But, I mean, that’s terrible, his death.’

  ‘So you didn’t know him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ever see him? Speak to him? Tell him to get his hands off your woman?’

  ‘Not really my style,’ I said truthfully enough.

  ‘Come on,’ he urged. ‘You see your bird walking down the street on the arm of some new bloke, this bird who you’ve had a short, intense relationship with that you didn’t want to end. Well, it’d be pretty unnatural not to feel angry and pissed off about it, not to want to stick one on the little fucker, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I felt things, but I didn’t feel like sticking one on him, no.’

  ‘Didn’t feel like killing him?’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Not really, no. You don’t look the type. But I was wondering if you knew anything about Mr Kramer’s sexual proclivities.’

  ‘Why would I?’ I answered.

  ‘You might know through Catherine. I was thinking that maybe all three of you had some sexual proclivities in common.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m not saying anything,’ he said. ‘I’m just asking some routine questions.’

  None of it sounded even remotely routine to me, but I said simply, ‘No, I don’t know anything about Kramer’s sexual proclivities.’

  ‘So you can’t be any help to us with his murder?’

  ‘His murder?’ I said slowly and deliberately, feigning shock and surprise, and hoping I wasn’t overdoing it. ‘You never said he was murdered.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Crawford agreed. ‘And you probably can’t tell us anything about the mutilation either.’

  ‘Jesus. What mutilation?’ This time the shock was real and I hoped it didn’t betray the inauthenticity of my previous reaction.

  ‘We don’t release that sort of stuff to the papers,’ Crawford said, like he was letting me in on a trick of the trade. ‘If you do, then you get a spate of copycat incidents. That’s amazing, isn’t it? Most murderers are so fucking unoriginal they can’t even think up their own way of killing someone. But put it in the papers that somebody’s going around chopping people’s heads off with a chain saw and they’re all at it.’

  ‘Somebody used a chain saw on this man Kramer?’

  ‘No. That’s just a for instance. I can’t tell you what form or forms of mutilation are involved, not that I think you’re likely to commit a copycat murder.’

  By now I was well beyond being able to hide my reactions. It was bad enough to think that Harold had committed the murder, but mutilation was a whole new horror. I was sure that my face and body were sending all kinds of quisling signals about what I was really thinking and feeling. Then Crawford said, ‘So you didn’t do it, then? The murder.’

  I was so taken by surprise that I had no time to consider my response. I just said, ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘I’m not stupid,’ he replied, and in that simple phrase he conveyed a whole world of strength and anger and violence. He was warning me not to mess with him, not to take him for a fool, not to cross him. I felt like apologizing. Then he said, ‘How would it be if I sent a couple of lads to search this place?’

  ‘What for?’ I asked.

  ‘For clues, that sort of thing. How would you feel?’

  ‘Well, I’d object, frankly.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, putting a tick on some mental list. ‘I like that. Most ordinary, innocent people would object. If you’d told me to go ahead, that you had nothing to hide, then I’d have been very suspicious.’

  I took some small satisfaction from knowing that I was behaving like an ordinary, innocent person, though that was not what I felt like.

  ‘Because, I mean,’ he continued, ‘everybody’s got something to hide, haven’t they? It might be a few porn videos or a secret diary or some ladies’ underwear. We’ve all got that certain little something, haven’t we?’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose, I mean, no, not really, not in my case.’

  ‘There’s no need to be shy with me,’ Crawford said. ‘I’ve heard it all. And I’ve seen most of it. And as long as nobody gets hurt and as long as kids and drugs and animals aren’t involved, then
who really cares? Some people want to drink each other’s piss, some want to shove their fists up each other’s backsides. There are blokes out there who like to have their foreskins nailed to the floorboards. Now you and I might think they’re sick, filthy sods who should be taken outside and given a good kicking, but, anyway, it’s a free country, isn’t it?’

  I was so lost by now, so far out of my depth, so in need of time to collect my thoughts, so confused about what this man was saying, even more confused about what he actually meant, so unsure of what he wanted from me, that I could barely keep up with him. But now he was being nice to me again.

  ‘I can see you’re a decent bloke,’ he said. ‘I can see you’re not into all that weird stuff. But what about this Kramer? What was he into, eh?’

  ‘I’ve told you, I’ve no way of knowing.’

  ‘Not true,’ he said. ‘You know Catherine. You know what kind of thing she might go for. Do you think she’d go for something a bit kinky and dangerous?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask her,’ I said.

  ‘I’m asking you, cunt.’

  All the aggression was there again, all the threats and veiled intentions. I was scared. I said, ‘Well, I don’t know, maybe. Yes, sometimes Catherine could be a bit … wild.’

  I didn’t think that answer was going to satisfy him but he unexpectedly stood up and headed for the door.

  ‘Correct answer,’ he said, and suddenly he looked pleased, both with me and himself. ‘You know crime’s a strange thing. There are very few people who commit just one crime. In general one crime leads on inexorably to the next, like joining up the dots until the final picture appears.’

  I must have been looking particularly blank, since he tried another way to make me understand.

  ‘Look at it like this, a man who commits armed raids on a post office isn’t too worried about having a TV licence or getting his car insured. You can be sure that the man who killed Kramer has committed other crimes too.’

  This sounded like rubbish to me. As far as I knew, which was not far, Harold hadn’t ever committed any other crime.

  ‘Does that mean you’re looking for a man who hasn’t paid his TV licence?’

  I wasn’t trying to be glib or tough, it just came out that way. Crawford had to think before he decided whether or not to be angry or insulted.

  ‘One more thing before I go. Have you got a pen and paper? I want to show you something.’

  I handed him a piece of paper and a ballpoint and he drew the outline of a footprint with a lightning flash through it.

  ‘Any idea what that means?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘No, I didn’t think you would have. Well, that’s all right then. I’ll be on my way, but take care. I’ll be in touch.’

  I was shaking by the time he left and he must have seen that. I hadn’t a clue what the session had really been about. He could hardly think I’d killed Kramer, otherwise he wouldn’t have been so easy on me. But I had been so thrown by his questions and his presence that he must surely have worked out that I knew more than I was telling. He obviously knew more than he was telling too, and I’d have given a lot to find out what. The fact that he hadn’t managed to talk to Catherine seemed to be infinitely in my favour.

  But I was worried by his notions of criminal psychology. As far as I was concerned foot fetishism didn’t come into the same category as urolagnia, fisting and having your foreskin nailed to the floor, but I suspected Crawford saw things differently. Foot fetishism did indeed seem to be something that Catherine, Kramer and I had in common, but was that supposed to suggest that we had murder in common too? And why had he shown me the drawing of the footprint with a flash through it? That must mean he had some inkling of Harold’s involvement. Why hadn’t he said so?

  Crawford scared me. He struck me as devious, vicious and not nearly as bright as he wanted to appear; a lethal combination. But how bright would he need to be to pin the murder on me? Making a clean breast of it seemed like even less of an option. I was on my own. I was the only suspect, the only witness and there was nobody in the whole world who was going to do anything to help me. I found that knowledge strangely invigorating.

  Twenty-five

  I made a big decision. I hired a white van. I’d already amassed a small city of cardboard boxes, all marked with the names of washing powders and potato snacks, and these poor things were going to become the containers of a lifetime’s erotic obsession. I was loading up my archive, moving it out of my cellar.

  I felt I was attempting to get rid of evidence, but evidence of what? Certainly nothing to do with murder, as far as I could see. I was simply trying to cover up a large chunk of my personality in case Crawford changed his mind and decided to search my house after all.

  In the beginning I thought all that was needed was a gentle pruning of the archive, a shedding of the most ‘incriminating’ material. It was obviously going to be necessary to get rid of the slides of Catherine’s feet, the ones I’d stolen from Kramer’s studio. They, as far as I knew, were the only direct link between me and the dead man, so of course they had to go. But it also seemed sensible to get rid of any other pictures of Catherine’s feet, the ones I’d taken myself, because that looked like something I had in common with Kramer. For much the same reason, I thought I’d better be rid of all the other foot pictures I’d taken, the ones of my old girlfriends, and the ones I’d taken with my hidden camera.

  Then it was only common sense to move out all the shoes I’d stolen over the years. If nothing else, they showed I was a criminal, albeit of a very specialized and comparatively harmless kind, or so it seemed to me, but I didn’t want to give Crawford anything he could possibly use against me. I kept recalling his absurd logic; that a man who committed murder would have committed some other trivial crimes first, that a minor aberration was a major pointer, a giant neon arrow, towards some bigger, more serious aberration. He might well think that if I’d stolen shoes and broken into Kramer’s flat I could be capable of anything.

  Then, painful though it was, I knew I had to get rid of the shoes that Harold had made for Catherine. It broke my heart to do it, but they all contained the trade mark of footprint and lightning flash, and their existence in my basement proved that I’d lied to Crawford about not recognizing the symbol. That left the archive with a very impoverished set of women’s footwear. It was as though all the best specimens had been looted. I could have hung on to what remained, but in Crawford’s eyes their possession might still have been evidence of sexual variance, so I felt they had to go too.

  I was trying desperately to see myself as someone else might, not as a normal, healthy man with an intense, but entirely sane sexual preference, but as some dodgy pervert, a thief and a liar, or in Crawford’s terms, a murderer in the making. In this process of externalization, I could see that wandering the streets asking women about their sex lives mightn’t be seen as simple harmless fun either, so I decided that all the questionnaires had better go too.

  The cuttings and printed material might have stayed, I suppose, but there were more problems there. Many of the books, for instance, dealt with the psychopathology of fetishism, and I didn’t want anything around the place suggesting that I was a psychopath. And as for my scrapbooks, well, I could see that certain people might think they were pretty strange. A lot of the pictures in there didn’t show complete women. In many cases I’d, so to speak, cut them in pieces. I’d kept the feet and thrown away the rest. I could now see how this might be construed as a form of mutilation. So they went as well. In fact, in the end, gradually and reluctantly, but inevitably, I decided it all had to go, the whole archive, the whole shebang. Once the cream had gone what was the point trying to live with the thin, skimmed remains? But go where?

  To have been absolutely safe I should probably have burned the lot, made a bonfire, a sacrifice, a funeral pyre, and to be fully correct I should probably have thrown myself on to it like a Hindu widow. But I didn’t have nea
rly enough balls or strength of character to do that. Instead, I rented a lock-up garage a mile or so from where I lived, and I loaded the archive into its cardboard boxes, hired the white van, and began the removal process.

  The garage was dry though not clean. It was windowless and no air circulated. It smelt of engine oil and there were bundles of old rags on the floor. I swept and cleaned up as best I could, but I couldn’t rid the place, or myself, of an oppressive feeling of misery. The corrugated iron walls and roof were reminiscent of shanty towns, of pig pens and chicken coops. I didn’t want to put my precious archive there, but what choice did I have?

  It was hard work doing the job alone, but there was no possibility of getting help. The boxes of shoes were light enough, but the files and cuttings were heavy, and it was all imbued with a psychological as well as a physical weight. I was packing up a part of my own personality. In denying the archive I was also denying myself, and it occurred to me that these fetish objects which previously might have been thought to be emblematic, indeed synecdochal, standing in as a substitute for a real woman or real sex, now seemed to be standing in as a substitute for me.

  I made a half-hearted attempt to label the boxes but it was clearly pointless. Once they were in the garage, stacked on top of one another, few would be accessible, and in any case, I couldn’t see myself needing access at the moment. Things had got too serious, too threatening, for me to want to toy with women’s shoes, to want to pore over images of feet every evening.

  Eventually my cellar was empty and the garage was full. I hooked a huge padlock on to the garage door and snapped it shut. The place looked reasonably secure but I could have wished for more. I needed a vault, a secret room, a cave guarded by mythical hounds. But this was going to have to do. Assuming there were no more developments and no revelations, no more visits from Crawford or his colleagues, then maybe a couple of months would be long enough to make me feel secure again. After that I could reclaim my archive, make it part of me again, return myself to myself. I looked forward hopefully to that day, but it never arrived.