Geoff Nicholson - Footsucker

‘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?’

‘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.’