I went there in working hours, pressed the doorbell and hoped for the best. A woman’s voice spoke in the entryphone and I muttered a few deliberately incomprehensible words. She said something equally incomprehensible in reply and pressed the buzzer that let me in.
I went up the stairs to the top of the building, to the studio, where I found a young woman in jeans and a lumberjack shirt, hair held back in a ponytail. She had her feet up on the desk and was smoking a joint. The place was a mess. There were boxes and tea chests all around her and it appeared she’d been half-heartedly packing and sorting through them. My presence gave her a surprise, and not a particularly pleasant one.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I thought you were a messenger.’
‘I’m a potential customer,’ I said.
She looked confused.
‘I’d like to see Mr Kramer,’ I said brightly.
Then she appeared terribly sad. She wouldn’t look me in the eye, and she said, ‘He’s passed away. I mean, he’s dead. Robert’s dead.’
‘Dead?’ I said. ‘That’s terrible. That’s really terrible. I had no idea.’
‘I’m just here holding the fort,’ she said. ‘Tidying up some loose ends. Sending out invoices. Paying bills.’
‘But I keep seeing his work everywhere. The Adiol campaign.’
‘Me too,’ she said. ‘It was all set up before he died, there was no reason to stop it. It breaks my heart every time I see it.’
‘That must be awful for you.’
‘It’s not so great.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I really am. I’ll go away and leave you to your work.’
I made as though to leave, but she said, ‘Since you’re here, what is it you wanted? Can I help?’
‘It sounds trivial now,’ I said. ‘I wanted Mr Kramer to take some photographs for me, that’s all. You see, I’m a shoe designer. I was so impressed by the photographs in the Adiol campaign I thought I’d like something similar to show off my own work.’
She didn’t look at all perturbed. This was probably how things were done in her business; one job led to another, work generated work.
‘It’s a real shame,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he’d have been very interested. What can I say?’
‘I’d better go,’ I said.
‘Hold on,’ and she started looking through a fat address book. ‘I can give you the names of a couple of photographers who might be good for the job.’
‘That’s really kind of you,’ I said.
She jotted down the names and phone numbers for me and handed over a slip of paper. ‘They were both good friends of Robert’s. He’d have been happy for them to have the work.’
She was sad again. She stared down at the address book and seemed hypnotized by it.
‘It’s a while since he died,’ she said. ‘I feel I ought to be getting over it by now.’
‘It takes a lot of time,’ I said. ‘It takes as long as it takes.’
She nodded and looked at me as though I’d said something profound. I said goodbye and again started to leave.
‘Oh, just one more thing,’ I said. ‘The model. You don’t happen to know whose feet those are in the Adiol photographs?’
‘Sure. She’s not with an agency. But I can give you her name and phone number if you like.’
Casually, helpfully, undramatically, she wrote out Catherine’s new phone number for me.
Twenty-nine
The number was not an American one after all. Catherine was still in the country somewhere. I looked in the book of dialling codes and saw it was in Yorkshire. I had no idea what she would be doing there. I hurried home and called the number. She answered the phone and her voice sounded so familiar, so untroubled, so far away from all the panic and fear I was going through.
‘Hallo?’ she said.
‘Hallo, it’s me.’
The effect was immediate. Her voice turned cold and hostile. ‘How did you get this number?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘What are you doing in Yorkshire?’
‘Getting away from you. You shouldn’t have called me.’
‘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?’