‘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?’