Catherine pulled up a dining chair and sat in front of me, opened her legs, raised them and placed one foot on each of my shoulders. I turned and kissed the tops of her feet and my eyes came very close to the shoes. The grain of the leather was strangely smooth and unmarked. It was less commonplace than I’d thought. It had a fine, waxy texture to it, and it was clearly not calf, not pigskin, not kid, in fact, not anything I’d ever seen before, at least not in this form.
And then I remembered what Crawford had said about Kramer’s mutilation. He’d said that Harold’s trade mark had been carved into the dead man’s chest, but he’d added ‘among other things’. I sniffed at the shoes, ran my fingers over them.
I said to Catherine, ‘They could be made out of human skin, couldn’t they?’
‘Couldn’t they just,’ she said.