‘I had to. I need you. I need your help. The police are after me. They seem to think I killed Kramer.’
She fell silent. I could feel aggression crackling down the phone at me. At last she said, ‘Didn’t you?’
‘Are you crazy?’ I said.
‘Are you?’
I was in no state to make great claims for my sanity and rationality, but it had never occurred to me that Catherine might think I was a murderer.
‘If you really think I did it then why haven’t you been to the police?’ I said.
‘Because I’m a fool. Because I don’t want you to go to prison, I guess. And that’s because I guess I’m still in love with you.’
That was a real shock.
‘I never knew you were in love with me at all,’ I said.
‘It took me a while to realize.’
‘You’ve picked a great moment to tell me. Why did you go off with Kramer?’
‘I didn’t go off with him. I fucked him once or twice, that’s all. It started out as a professional relationship, as a matter of fact. And it was mostly your fault.’
‘Hey!’ I protested. ‘Come on.’
‘It’s true,’ she insisted. ‘You made me realize I had a pair of pretty special feet. I thought others might think so too. I talked to a few people and they put me in touch with Kramer, this guy who needed a foot model for a campaign he was shooting. That’s all. That’s how it started. And it would have ended just as quickly. He was a sleaze. But you shouldn’t have followed us. You shouldn’t have been waiting in the car. That made me mad. And you shouldn’t have killed him.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘So who did?’
‘Harold’, I said.
‘Harold? Oh, get real. Harold couldn’t kill anybody.’
‘But you think I could?’
‘Oh shit, I don’t know.’
I did my best to explain what little I understood about Harold’s state of mind, and what I imagined to be his motives for killing Kramer.
‘That’s terrible, if it’s true,’ she said. ‘Poor Harold. So why don’t you go to the police?’
‘Because I think they won’t believe me. Why would they
if you don’t? But all this is beside the point. I want to see you. Can I see you?’
‘No, not yet. Maybe not ever. I don’t know. Why? What would we do?’
‘Talk about the good old days?’ I suggested.
‘I’m going to have to think about all this,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. Jesus. I don’t know what to believe.’
Later that night she rang me back. It felt like an enormous breakthrough, a great concession on her part, and she sounded much softer, much more sympathetic.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘Have I got this right? There’s nothing that connects you to the murder. No hard evidence. Is that so?’
‘Nothing directly,’ I said. ‘But there’s plenty of circumstantial.’
I thought about my archive, about that dirty corrugated-iron garage and I wished I could somehow magically make it disappear.
‘In the absence of real evidence they’d never convict you, right?’ Catherine said.
‘Your faith in British justice is touching,’ I said.
‘Let me finish. But there’s even less evidence to connect the murder to Harold. You could say he did it, he could say you did it. Stalemate. That could happen, couldn’t it?’
‘I suppose.’
‘One or other of you would have to confess.’
‘What do you mean, one or other of us? I have nothing to confess to. Do you still not believe me?’
‘I want to believe you. I think I do, but I need to do something first.’
She wouldn’t tell me what that something was. She put down the phone. My brain felt as though it was about to caramelize and I decided I was going to destroy my archive.
Thirty
When I got to the row of lock-ups I could see there was a man hanging around, more or less where my own garage was, and it took me longer than it should have to realize that the man was Crawford. I was tempted to turn and run, but it was obvious that Crawford had seen me even before I saw him, and he would no doubt have given chase. More importantly, if he was hanging around near the archive I wanted to be there too, to protect it if nothing else, although that seemed pretty absurd given that I’d gone there to destroy it.
I kept walking towards Crawford and he watched me, but his face showed no more emotion than if he had been staring at a blank television screen. Even when I got to the door of the garage he didn’t say anything, just stepped back and gestured that I should go ahead and unlock the door. He watched as I turned the key in the padlock and his scrutiny made me clumsy, but at last I fumbled the door open and swung it aside, and I looked into the garage to see that it was completely empty. It had been cleaned out, swept bare so that it ached with absence. I turned to Crawford and at last he was animated.
‘I just wanted to see your face when you opened that garage,’ he said, and he chuckled and looked nauseatingly pleased with himself.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
‘I’ve borrowed your little collection, OK?’
‘No, it’s not OK.’
‘Tough.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want a bit of co-operation. I want you to help me with my inquiries. The usual stuff. You don’t mind, do you? Well, it’s all the same if you do. Now, I could take you down the station, do it all properly, get you to make a statement, offer you a legal representative, that kind of crap, but I think it’d be better if we kept it nice and casual, don’t you?’
I certainly didn’t want to be formally questioned in some police station, but there was something about Crawford’s use of the world casual that promised the worst. I didn’t know what to say or do, but it soon became obvious that nothing I said or did was going to make any difference. A white car appeared out of nowhere and Crawford bundled me into the back of it. The car was unmarked but it had a police radio and there was a young, gaunt, red-haired man driving.
‘This is Angus,’ Crawford said, giving no indication whether that was the driver’s first or second name. ‘He’s a gem.’
I saw that the dashboard was littered with chewing-gum wrappers, and the interior of the car smelt of spearmint and Kentucky fried chicken. Angus drove fast and angrily. He was in a terrible hurry to get me where I was going.
‘Am I under arrest?’ I asked.
‘Oh, grow up,’ Crawford said, and the driver laughed.
I didn’t say anything after that, just looked out of the window until our destination came into sight; a small industrial building that might once have been a factory or warehouse. Now it looked unused and abandoned, but a sliding door was open in the side wall and there was an empty police van parked beside it. Angus stopped the car and the three of us went into the building. I wondered if I was about to experience some much-mythologized police brutality.
There were no windows in the walls of the building, but the roof had glass panels, and light fanned down to the floor beneath to where my entire archive was immaculately, systematically, and above all, nakedly, laid out. The books and files had been subdivided into orderly piles, and all the hundreds of shoes were laid out in pairs, in neatly engineered rows. I had never seen my archive from this perspective. It was like looking down on a futuristic city with its thoroughfares and high-rises. I felt strangely moved. Two uniformed policemen were moving among the rows, noting things down in notebooks, attempting to categorize and catalogue what they saw. They looked up as the three of us came in. They shrugged and laughed, to show that they thought this work was absurd and beneath their dignity. Nevertheless, they were treating the archive with a touching degree of care.
We walked through the building until we came to a small, partitioned office. It had windows of wired glass but newspaper had been stuck over them to prevent anyone seeing in. There were three chairs in the office, made of an inappropriately cheerful
orange plastic. Crawford had me sit down in the middle chair, slammed the office door shut and said, ‘OK, now all you have to do is tell me everything.’
Some hours later I was tired, confused, scared and no longer sure of what I was saying or of what I knew. I had indeed tried to tell them ‘everything’; all about me and my fetishism, about Catherine and Harold and Kramer. All about Alicia and the man from the ICA. I’d explained my archive, the reason for its existence, the way it had been created. I’d even told them about Natasha, in the forlorn hope that would make me seem more ‘normal’. The only thing I’d kept back, and I was quite proud of myself for doing it, was the fact that I’d spoken to Catherine and knew her phone number.
Not that it made any difference. Crawford didn’t seem to believe much of what I said, and what he did believe he didn’t like. His colleague had said barely three words during the whole session, but he didn’t have to speak. He was there to ooze menace and anger and contempt, and he was good at it. He was a natural. But eventually a moment came when I had no more to say, nothing else to reveal about myself. I fell into a profound, enervated silence, at which point Crawford perked up.
‘Right then, let’s see how much wiser I am than when we started. We’ve established that you like feet and shoes. You like them so much you’re prepared to harass women in the street over them. You’re prepared to make a criminal of yourself by stealing them. You put together a sick little “archive”, and you go to clubs that celebrate “sexual difference”, and you go to prostitutes and you beat up men that you’ve picked up at the ICA.
‘Now, we don’t know why you’re this way. It could be your mother’s fault for not giving you enough tit when you were a kid, or it could be because you were once scared by a bare fanny. But either way it doesn’t make any difference, does it, because you say you’re very happy to live with this fetish of yours.’
I nodded. For a moment I thought he was being sympathetic.
‘Now,’ he continued, ‘as far as I can see, this means that when you get a bird in the bedroom it doesn’t matter what her face is like, what her figure’s like, all you’re interested in is her plates of meat. And when she lets you have your way, you make straight for the tootsies. You like to snog ‘em, drool over ‘em, wank over ‘em. Have I got all this right?’
It wasn’t only his choice of vocabulary that vulgarized and misrepresented me. The mere fact of being described by Crawford was belittling in itself. Nevertheless I nodded, didn’t argue, agreed to his crass, cartoon version of myself.
‘So, anyway,’ Crawford continued, ‘you find this Catherine, this perfect woman with this perfect pair of feet, and she lets you do all this weird stuff to her and you like that a lot, a helluva lot. You think this must be the Real Thing. The pervert’s suddenly in love. But then she leaves you for this geezer Kramer, who also appears to like a good pair of feet and who happens to get murdered not long after. Funny old world, isn’t it?
‘However, by now we’ve switched into fairy-tale mode, haven’t we? Now we get the quaint old shoemaker who makes fabulous fuck-me shoes and does a little bit of murder and mutilation on his day off. And wouldn’t you know it, the bugger’s now gone and disappeared. Am I still on the right track, here? I haven’t lost the plot yet, have I?’
‘No,’ I said.
Crawford turned away from me and addressed his next remarks to his colleague.
‘I don’t know what you think, Angus, but I don’t think we need all this crud about fetishism. It’s highly colourful as a bit of motivation, but I don’t see that it’s necessary at all. I don’t see that we need Freud or Krafft-bloody-Ebing or even the old shoemaker. Some bloke steals your bird so you kill him. Sounds a bit drastic but it’s perfectly straightforward, happens every day, doesn’t it?’
Angus nodded but still said nothing.
‘Kramer was a very nasty piece of work,’ Crawford said to me. ‘We know that. Photography was the least of what he was into. Nasty stuff. I’d rather not go into details. Personally I wouldn’t blame you at all for killing him.’
He gave a fake sympathetic smile.
‘But the mutilation, that was going a bit far, wasn’t it? Don’t you think?’
‘I don’t know anything about the mutilation,’ I said.
‘Take your shirt off,’ Crawford instructed.
I hesitated for a moment and that was too long for him. He grabbed the front of my shirt and ripped it open. He took a black felt-tip pen and began to draw on my chest. I looked down, unable at first to decipher the drawing but I soon realized that he’d drawn a crude version of Harold Wilmer’s trade mark: the footprint and the lightning flash.
‘That’s what you did to Kramer, isn’t it?’ said Crawford. ‘Except you used a knife instead of a pen.’
I shook my head in denial and disbelief.
‘Is that really what he did?’ I asked.
‘It’s what you did,’ he said. ‘But, then, you probably know people who do that kind of thing for kicks.’
It didn’t seem to matter what I said any more. I was long past lying or trying to please my interrogator. I looked Crawford in the eye and said, ‘If you really think I’m capable of murdering a man and slashing designs on his chest with a knife, then you’re even more stupid than I thought you were.’
I was ready for him to turn nasty but in fact he appeared to be amused.
‘You’re good, I’ll give you that,’ he said. ‘I mean, you’re very convincing. It would be easy to believe you didn’t do it. What do you think, Angus?’
Crawford’s colleague looked at me dispassionately, apparently disinterestedly, and said, ‘I think he did it.’
‘You could be right,’ Crawford said. Then he became very thoughtful and said to me, ‘Right, I want to try out a little theory of mine. Get on the floor, on your hands and knees.’
I hesitated again, but not for long. Crawford pulled me off my chair and threw me on the ground. I got into a kneeling position. There was a horrible inevitability about what happened next as Crawford kicked off his right shoe, a highly polished black Oxford, pulled off his nylon sock and shoved his bare foot into my face.
‘Suck it,’ he said. ‘Suck it the way you’d suck Catherine’s.’
‘No,’ I said.
Crawford barely reacted. He still didn’t look angry, but he tilted his head towards his colleague who immediately got up and kicked me at the base of my spine. The effect was truly staggering, as though my back had been turned into a piano keyboard, and every key was playing a separate note of pain.
‘We can try that game too,’ said Crawford. ‘But you’ll lose and you’ll still have to suck it.’
So I sucked the bastard’s foot. Why not? It was loathsome and filthy, it tasted of bad meat, of rubber and decaying metal. The nails were sharp and horny, the toes bristling with black hairs. The flesh was soft and damp with sweat. But what did it matter? I sucked it, not quite the way I’d have sucked Catherine’s, but not so very differently. It occurred to me then that these two men might do anything to me; beat me, fuck me, kill me. Anything. But Crawford suddenly withdrew his foot from my mouth.
‘No, sorry, Tiger,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t do a thing for me. Seems I’m not a pervert after all.’
He was putting his shoe and sock back on when there was a knock on the door and one of the uniformed policemen put his head round to tell Crawford he was wanted on the phone. He left the office and I was left with Angus. In Crawford’s absence he relaxed a lot, became a lot less angry. He offered me a cigarette, but I turned it down.
‘Very sensible,’ he said. Then, obviously thinking of Crawford, he continued, ‘He’s a cunt, but he’s good.’
Crawford returned a minute later. Now his face looked bruised with a hot flush of blood. He was in a rage, his hands were trembling.
‘I wonder if you could leave us alone now, Angus?’ he said, his voice straining to stay in control.
Angus looked very surprised.
‘You were
wrong,’ Crawford said to him. ‘He didn’t do it.’
Angus left the office. Crawford slammed the door after him and I felt extremely frightened.
‘We had a phone call,’ Crawford said. ‘You didn’t do it.’
‘What phone call?’ I said. ‘Who from?’
Ignoring my questions he said, ‘I’m very sorry you didn’t do it, actually. I wish you had. But it seems you’re not a murderer after all, just a toe-rag.’ He laughed heartily to himself, then added, ‘I’ve been waiting a long time to say that. Get up.’
He led me out of the office into the main body of the building where my archive was still all laid out. There was nobody there now. The uniformed police had gone, and through the open doors I could see that Angus was waiting behind the wheel of the white car.
‘This little collection of yours is the most pitiful thing I’ve seen in years,’ said Crawford. ‘It’s fucking sad. You turn my stomach, you know that? But you didn’t kill Kramer.’
‘Of course I didn’t,’ I said.
‘And you didn’t carve a footprint on his chest, among other things.’
‘I know,’ I said.
Crawford hit me a number of times; in the face, in the balls, and in the stomach and kidneys after I’d fallen to the ground. None of them hurt nearly as much as the single blow from his colleague had, but he seemed to be satisfied with what he’d done. He walked away, out of the building to the waiting car. I heard the door slam and the car pull away long before I was able to stand and walk.
When I eventually gathered my wits together, I sat up and looked at the archive arranged around me. It was unharmed and intact. It wouldn’t have been so hard to gather it together as best I could, hire another van maybe, take it all home with me, return it to my cellar. Nothing physical had been destroyed, nothing should have changed, and yet, having been exposed to scrutiny and scorn, the objects in the archive had lost their magic. The fetishes had been stripped of their power. I didn’t need them any more. I had no further use for them. I stood up painfully and limped away from it all.
Thirty-one
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