Footsucker

Twenty-nine

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.