Can I ask a small favour of you? Nothing too onerous, just something you might usefully store away at the back of your memory.
Can I ask a small favour of you? Nothing too onerous, just something you might usefully store away at the back of your memory. It is this: if I am ever found dead, padlocked inside a sports hold-all and dumped in the bath and the police — having investigated events ineffectually for a week or more — tell you I did it all myself as part of an auto-erotic experiment which went horribly wrong, don’t believe them. However fervent the rozzers might seem in their belief, no matter what contortionist, escapologist or magician they employ to prove that it can be done, please trust me on this: I did not do it, someone else did it to me. Probably Diane Abbott, although you would need to prove that point.
Having read the morning papers and become unaccountably curious, I tried to climb inside a hold-all last night in the expectation of being consumed by an erotic miasma, and I wrenched my left knee out of its socket. The only bits of me I could get in the hold-all were my legs and 16 per cent of my backside. As I tried to get comfortable there were ominous noises of things tearing, a clean and sharp rip as the fabric of the bag swiftly separated itself from the zip and then a wet, guttural exclamation, like you get when you tear off the leg of a fresh-from-the-oven roast chicken, as my anterior cruciate ligament separated itself from my knee. I howled. My five-year-old daughter appeared in the doorway. ‘Why are you sitting in that bag and crying, daddy?’ she asked. How does one explain this sort of thing to a child? ‘I am investigating a possible murder,’ I said to her. ‘And now run along, darling, because I am about to pleasure myself.’
I suppose we should be amenable to the notion that one might get some form of sexual frisson from being locked up in a gym bag, especially if it is, say, Caroline Flint’s gym bag and there’s still some of her stuff in it. But it is hard to fathom, and virtually impossible to pull off, so to speak, in person unless you are David Blaine. Of course people do attempt very strange things in the pursuit of sexual pleasure, such as nailing their genitals to planks of wood or hanging themselves while wearing nylon tights and chewing on a tangerine. These latter hedonists are known, among Britain’s vibrant community of auto-eroticists, as ‘gaspers’, because of the noise they make as they approach the nirvana of sexual oblivion. The lack of oxygen to the brain occasioned by a noose confers a certain light-headedness upon the participant, which is reputed to enhance sexual pleasure; it is dignified by science with the term ‘paraphilia’. Obviously, there are dangers.
In 1791, the Bohemian composer and violinist Frantisek Kotzwara expired in just this manner, having tied his neck to a door handle while being attended to by an agreeable English prostitute called Susannah Hill. He had earlier requested that Susannah snip off his genitals with a pair of shears which he had handy, but the lady declined to do so. He died all the same, asphyxiated. I hope he was happy. More recently the drug-addled American actor David Carradine — ‘Grasshopper’ in the TV series Kung Fu — died while attempting some sort of sexual epiphany by hanging himself in a wardrobe, much as you would a jacket. A wardrobe, I can envisage. But I cannot find anywhere in the annals of paraphilia an account of someone locking themselves in a suitcase or hold-all. If the police and the security services are correct, Gareth Williams was a quite remarkable chap.
Williams was the 31-year-old spy who, police suggest, killed himself in an auto-erotic experiment involving an expensive hold-all, padlocked in the case and placed in the bath. The hold-all had a capacity of 80 litres — probably more than enough to accommodate Mr Williams, but not without twisting bits of him around in a manner which would be nigh impossible if he were alive. How he padlocked the case from within is a mystery. Also, how he managed to do all this in the bath. Early reports suggested that there was a ‘strange’ and never to be identified liquid in the bag with him. Later it was revealed that the police were hunting a ‘Mediterranean couple’. And then, when it seemed that no more information was forthcoming, it was revealed that Mr Williams was a ‘cross-dresser’ or a ‘transvestite’ and — according to the Sun — ‘was known to meet men in the Gay Mecca of Soho’. I have also met men in the Gay Mecca of Soho, usually for a drink at the Coach and Horses, and then maybe a plate of chicken in black bean sauce down Brewer Street — so if the Old Bill trot that one out when I’m found dead, give it short shrift. (Incidentally, don’t you just adore the sublime oxymoron ‘Gay Mecca’?)
I have the intense suspicion that if Mr Williams had been found with a steak knife through his heart and a note affixed saying ‘Die, Infidel Scum’, the authorities would still have told us it was some form of bizarre auto-eroticism and would have further informed us that he wore a wig and liked Judy Garland. It has become a compelling diversionary tactic, alleging a penchant for sexual weirdness on the part of the victim; it seems designed to cover up their inability to solve the case, or perhaps to express a wish that the whole incident would disappear because the details are politically sensitive. Still, at least it’s an explanation of sorts, which must be a comfort to Gareth Williams’s family and friends.
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