‘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 nearly 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?