Geoff Nicholson - Footsucker

‘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.

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?’

‘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.

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.