Geoff Nicholson - Footsucker

‘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.

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.

After I tracked down Catherine and spoke to her on the phone, when I put the idea in her mind that perhaps I wasn’t the murderer after all, that Harold was, she knew exactly how to find him and she did so. Catherine is no fool. She put two and two together and realized that I was likely to be telling the truth, that Harold might indeed have killed Kramer, and subsequently she managed to convince Harold to turn himself in and make a full confession. She took him along to the police where he told them everything, much more than I could have. They believed him, and shortly thereafter someone made a phone call to Crawford, and that was the only reason he decided that I hadn’t committed the murder.

Those are the bare bones of the story, and I have probably spent too much time trying to put flesh on them. I realized it was unreasonable of me but I was angry and upset to learn that Catherine and Harold had seen each other in my absence. I felt betrayed. I thought they had no connection except through me, and I wanted it to remain that way. I picture them in Harold’s workshop, or later in some secret unknown place, Catherine arriving, Harold proffering the latest pair of shoes. I can see his leathery old hands slipping some flimsy, exotic creation on to Catherine’s perfect foot. I see her walking across the room, turning, posing, wheeling on tiptoe. I know that all this must have really happened.

Of course, I see a powerful erotic element here, and sometimes my vision of the scene takes on a pornographic, fantastical aspect. Then I visualize Catherine being naked, except for the shoes, displaying herself, showing herself to Harold. Sometimes his involvement is simply voyeuristic, he simply watches and is appreciative. But other times he touches, strokes, kisses, penetrates. And she reciprocates, runs her hands, lips, feet, over Harold’s old, small, sagging body.

I don’t know if that really happened or not. Catherine won’t tell me and perhaps I should be grateful not to know, but there are times when it seems all too likely. For Catherine it would have been just another adventure, and if Harold really was sexually involved with her that would give him much more reason for killing Kramer.

And I wonder sometimes how Catherine got him to con fess to the murder. I have asked her, and she tells me she appealed to his better nature, but I know that’s just an evasive joke. I can easily envisage a number of perverse scenarios; the two of them together, naked, in bed, or on the floor, or in a hotel, or out of doors, Catherine in tortuously high heels egging him on, apparently for some sort of weird sexual gratification. ‘Did you ever kill a man, Harold? Did you strip him naked? Did you mutilate the body? Did you carve your trade mark in his chest?’ And Harold says yes, he did, he did all that and more, and he did it for her because he was in love with her. And perhaps Catherine is filled with horror and immediately disentangles herself from his embrace, but it seems equally likely that she’d wait until he’d finished, until the old bones and the old flesh had concluded their business. And then she tells him the game is up, that she knows everything, that she’ll blow the whistle if he doesn’t turn himself in.