‘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
The most important scene in this whole drama took place in my absence. I wasn’t there. I didn’t see what happened or how or why, and the two people who were there have very good reasons for refusing to tell me the precise details.
First, what I do know. It appears that Harold Wilmer’s disappearance was not as complete as I had imagined. Although he abandoned his shop and made himself unavailable both to me and to the police, he never lost touch with Catherine. In fact I discovered that even before then, Catherine and Harold had been in regular contact. I know now that they continued to see each other after Catherine and I split up. I know now that he continued to make shoes for her. I also know that she never told him she was seeing Kramer, and when he found out, when I told him, that’s when he decided to become a murderer. And once Kramer was dead he broke the news to Catherine, only he told her I was the one who’d done it.