Sock It To Me

You could hardly move for socks. The everyday apparel for keeping human feet warm were everywhere: on the floor was a deep pelt of them and they draped over curtain rods, coffee tables, microwaves, bathroom sink, everywhere, in fact. Everywhere you looked you were confronted by socks: woollen socks, nylon ones, stripey ones, austere blue, ones with pictures of Homer Simpson on them.

DS Padmore, a policeman of some 10 years experience wondered what the hell this was all about, even though he knew perfectly well. The last months in the smart little seaside town of Southport had seen reports even in the press of socks being stolen from washing lines, house-breakings where only socks were stolen and men being approached in pubs and asked to donate their socks for charity. What was it about socks? He’d heard of knicker-fetishists, shoes, even, but socks?

There was a funk in the air from the socks, a foetid funk, an unhealthy smell like from athlete’s foot. It made DS Padmore nauseous.

“Who lives in a house like this?” he thought in a David Frost-type voice in that programme where we all took an envious nosey around someone’s expensive abode. It would be some non-entity or other that David wanted to bang. The blonde yin out of Buck’s Fizz, perhaps. Mind you. Weren’t they all blonde in Buck’s Fizz?

What kind of kick did you get out of obsessively collecting men’s socks? DS Padmore had several images in his head at once and not one of them very welcome.

The socks had tags on them with details of the previous owner even if it was only the address they were stolen from. Many of them had polaroids attached with an image of the sock-donor while wearing the socks; a smiling man half-cut with a stupid grin and a thumbs-up gesture. The policeman recognised a few of the pubs from the décor. He even recognised some of the donors as petty-criminals he’d have thought too street-wise to agree to give up their socks, or anything else for that matter. There was Chubby Kane, for instance, a man who’d done serious time in Walton and in other nicks. His photo was attached to a pair of green and red argyle’s.

He'd bet the sock-collector’s or perverts or whatever they were were scousers. There was humour here as well as theft and deviancy and these were all calling cards of your Liverpudlian scally. Tam Padmore was a Glaswegian and this gave him an insight into the scouse criminal mind because it wasn’t that far removed from the mentality of the less righteous of his townies. Cheeky and inventive and notoriously anti-establishment.

But where was the profit in this? What was the pay-off?

One day they would offer these socks back to the original owners. After all, it was their property. No-one would come forward to claim.