William Heming is a mild-mannered estate agent in a sleepy English suburb. His smart suit and polished brogues give little away; there’s nothing ostentatious about his appearance, nothing memorable, not even a whiff of aftershave; and he certainly isn’t one to seek the limelight. You wouldn’t give him a second look if you walked past him in the street. He watches you, however. He watches everyone.
How best to describe it? A “hobby”? An “obsessive sport”? Across the walls of his flat, “arranged like a map of the town”, are copies of keys to each and every property his company has ever looked after, “each opening a lock in a portal to pleasure and adventure”. He’s not a stalker or voyeur, nothing so crude as a Peeping Tom; his “art” is something decidedly more delicate: “I am simply sharing an experience, a life as it happens. Think of me as an invisible brother or uncle or boyfriend. I’m no trouble. I may be there when you are, or when you are gone, or more likely just before you arrive.”
He has his pet “subjects”: a “favourite breakfast spot” is a particularly messy family home; his weekend retreat an elderly woman’s country cottage left unoccupied while she visits her daughter; the dusty attic of the object of his affection becomes a cocoon in which to hole up for the night while she slumbers, unaware, in the room beneath him. He thinks of them as butterflies “pinned to my board”, a sly reference, one assumes, to Frederick Clegg, the lepidopterist/clerk-turned-kidnapper of John Fowles’s The Collector. As with Clegg, Heming’s motives aren’t obviously sexual: “You wouldn’t describe me as a predator, not in that way,” he explains. On the surface he’s a “model citizen” with a finely tuned social conscience, but this is spliced with a psychotic side: thus, neighbourly good deeds and violent vigilante justice sit side by side. Most chilling of all, however, is the slow accumulation – like the “drip, drip of steady mischief” Heming is so good at conjuring up for anyone who crosses him – of a litany of increasingly disturbing crimes and misdemeanours, something that’s even more unsettling when we learn at just how tender an age his first transgressions took place.
The first-person portrayal of a truly cold-blooded protagonist is a hard thing to pull off, especially one whose outward appearance is so benign but Phil Hogan has created an antihero horrifically ruthless and disquieting.
A Pleasure and a Calling is published by Black Swan (£7.99). Click here to buy it for £6.39
