Felix in the Underworld

by John Mortimer

  Felix put everything back into the brown envelope and, being alone in the compartment, threw it out of the train window as they approached Guildford.

  Chapter Nine

  In the crime stories Felix had read, in the films he had seen, the central character returns to find his house in total disorder, drawers pulled out, desk rifled and cupboards emptied, in the search for some clue or treasure he didn’t know he possessed. Feeling that an undeserved and fraudulent mystery had been dumped upon him, he was not surprised, some days later, to find that a window-pane next to the front door and giving on to a downstairs lavatory had been broken and the window was swinging open. By the seat a small table, carrying a pile of literary magazines and a useful work called The World’s Most Popular Plots, had been upset and an entrance clearly effected. After a thorough and prolonged search of his home he found nothing missing or apparently disturbed. What housebreaker would enter merely for the pleasure of looking at his ornaments, reading the half-covered sheet of paper on his desk, or taking in the view of the sea from his workroom window?

  A week later he gave himself a day off to go to London, having invited Ms Bodkin to lunch in the wine bar opposite Llama Books in the Fulham Road. As usual he looked forward eagerly to such an encounter but this time it went badly from the start. Brenda arrived twenty-five minutes late and apparently triumphant.

  ‘I’ve been speaking to Lucasta,’ she told him. ‘She’s all set to do a piece in the Meteor.’

  ‘About my book?’

  ‘About your baby!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Of course she’ll give the book a passing mensh.’

  ‘It’s not a baby. It’s ten. And it’s certainly not mine!’

  ‘Oh, go on, Felix!’ Brenda was laughing happily. ‘You know how keen you are on doing it. You hardly talk about anything else.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t do it with her. Not with the child’s mother. Not on a lilo on the beach.’

  ‘Is that where it happened?’

  ‘I don’t know who she is. That is to say, I hardly know who she is.’

  ‘Make up your mind.’

  ‘I had no idea who she was when this unfortunate child was conceived.’

  ‘Unfortunate? Why do you say he’s unfortunate? I should think he’s quite lucky if he’s got you for a father. A person in the public eye.’

  ‘Listen, Brenda’ – Felix tried to sound firm, clear-headed and determined– ‘I have no children. Nothing ever happened. We’ve got to kill it.’

  ‘The child?’

  ‘Of course not! The story.’

  ‘Too late. Lucasta’s getting all the details.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Someone’s rung her who knows you quite well and, incidentally, he’s a tremendous admirer of your work.’

  ‘Oh, my God! Gavin!’ Felix shouted, causing the copyeditors at the next table to look up in alarm.

  ‘Who the hell’s Gavin?’

  ‘He’s been following me. Dogging my footsteps. Persecuting me! Actually you met him at Millstream’s.’

  ‘The Gothic couple? And that woman . . . ?’

  ‘Ian’s mother.’

  ‘Felix, you must have shut your eyes very tightly indeed. Hadn’t you better tell me the whole story?’

  Telling it was a relief to Felix. He went through it all from the first-time caller on the Denny Densher show, the tape-recorded message, the lunch with Miriam, the meeting with Huw Hotchkiss and the letter from PROD. She listened attentively and he felt, as he didn’t always feel with Brenda, whom he loved, that he was being interesting. At the end of it she put her hand on his and said, ‘So PROD are after you?’

  ‘Twenty thousand and growing steadily.’

  ‘That’s a hell of a lot of money!’ Brenda gave a respectful whistle.

  ‘So I don’t really want a story in the papers,’ he told her. ‘Not till the whole thing’s settled.’

  ‘When’s that going to be?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I’m going to find Gavin and have it out with him finally. He started all this. So can you hold Lucasta off?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘We’ll have a wonderful time, won’t we, when we go abroad?’ Felix did his best to turn the conversation to happier subjects.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Ms Bodkin smiled at him, ‘abroad is likely to be postponed. You’ve got too much on your plate.’

  ‘Isn’t it the Basingstoke Literary Circle next week? I know that’s not exactly abroad but. . .’

  ‘No, Basingstoke is not abroad.’ Ms Bodkin was quite firmly of the opinion. ‘Anyway, I’m not sure how you’ll get there. I’ve got so much on I don’t think I’ll be able to drive you to Basingstoke.’

  ‘What about Terry, the rep?’

  ‘Terry’s away.’ Brenda slid up the cuff of her footballing shirt and stared closely at her Mickey Mouse watch. ‘It’s half past already! I’ll be late for the meeting with Tubal-Smith. Goodbye, Felix. I’ve really got to scoot.’ So she gulped the rest of her glass of Fleurie and scooted with her game pie hardly touched. And Felix, filled with hardly bearable loneliness, went off to find a telephone directory and the address of Epsilon Books.

  ‘Mr Morsom, sir. This is indeed an honour. If you have anything in your “bottom drawer”, sir. Anything which may have given Tubal-Smith of Llama “cold feet”. Something not for the “general reader”. Shall we say, “flagellation”, “bestiality”, “necrophilia”, “socialism”? We would issue it for you, sir. Cloth-bound. A “luxury presentation”. Copies for private circulation among a “few close friends”. On the most “reasonable terms”.’

  ‘I just dropped in . . .’

  ‘And I’m so glad you did, Mr Morsom. So delighted you did. We could, of course, publish you under a “suitable pseudonym”, “confidentiality guaranteed”. A well-known male sportswriter, who shall be entirely nameless, does the Sadie at School series under the name of Petunia d’Aquitaine. We could cloak you, Mr Morsom, under some such similar disguise.’

  ‘I just called in here to see one of your staff’

  ‘Staff Mr Morsom? We are a “slender outfit”, sir. Very “slimmed down” indeed.’ The chairman of Epsilon Books, who had introduced himself as Jasper Kettering – a name which sounded to Felix as spurious as Petunia d’Aquitaine – was a tall, florid man, dressed in a tweed jacket and spotted bow-tie, whose hands trembled and whose hair looked as though it had been dyed with boot polish. He spoke largely in inverted commas as he stood in the middle of the basement room in Gordon Square, among piles of cardboard boxes and forgotten manuscripts, and waved a large, shaky hand at his secretary who, wrapped in a plaid shawl, grinned at them from behind her typewriter.

  ‘And Gavin Piercey?’

  ‘Gavin?’ Jasper Kettering looked doubtful for a moment, as though he had been spoken to in a foreign language.

  ‘Piercey.’

  ‘Oh, Gavin Piercey!’ Kettering beamed in delighted recognition. ‘Epsilon, as I always say, stands on “twin pillars”. Miss Trigg is one and Gavin Piercey’s the other. “Tireless on the road”. Much loved in the bookshops which deal with “specialized and selective reading”. Gavin is the sort that “won’t take no for an answer”. Without Gavin, Epsilon would long ago have been on “queer street”. And without Miss Trigg too, of course. The only “fly in our own little brand of ointment” is. . .’

  ‘Gavin seems to have vanished.’ The secretary was smiling broadly, as though Gavin’s disappearance was an irresistible joke.

  ‘Not vanished, Miss Trigg. It’s far too soon to say he’s vanished. Let’s say a “strange silence” has fallen over him.’

  ‘Silence?’ Felix was puzzled. ‘From all I’ve heard Gavin’s been far from silent.’

  ‘He has favoured us’ – Mr Kettering looked solemn – ‘with a quite unusual silence. When he’s “on the road” Gavin usually “calls in” two or three times a day to “touch base”. Isn’t that so, Miss Trigg?’

  ‘Oh, m
ore often than that, Mr Kettering.’ Miss Trigg sighed patiently. ‘Considerably more often than that.’

  ‘But for the last three days “not a squeak”. Am I right, Miss Trigg?’

  ‘Entirely right, Mr Kettering.’

  ‘And we have telephoned his home number?’

  ‘Repeatedly. All I’ve listened to for the last three days is Gavin on his answering machine.’ Miss Trigg indulged in a little light laughter as though Gavin’s repeated message was in every way more enjoyable than Gavin direct.

  ‘Could you possibly give me his address?’

  ‘Could we give Mr Morsom Gavin’s address, Miss Trigg? Can you see “any objections”? I don’t believe there could be any “serious objection” if you were to “scribble it down”.’

  Miss Trigg scribbled it down on a small square of yellow paper and gave it to Felix as though she were glad of being shot of something distasteful. Mr Kettering said, ‘Is there any message we should pass on, Mr Morsom, when Gavin “puts in an appearance”?’

  ‘Just tell him to shut up! That’s all. Just tell him I came to shut him up.’ Something about the stuffy basement office and Mr Kettering’s oleaginous presence had restored to Felix the delightful feeling of being about to lose his temper. He slipped the yellow paper into his jacket pocket and said goodbye to Epsilon Books.

  The next day, when he was about to take his secretary for a large gin and tonic in a pub near the British Museum, Mr Kettering received a call which filled him with horror and surprise, so he almost dropped the phone. Miss Trigg, when it was relayed to her, received the news with amazing calm.

  After he had left the Epsilon offices Felix grew tired of hearing, from various phone boxes, Gavin’s flat monotone announcement that he was unavailable to come to the phone at the moment and would the caller please leave a message after the bleep. He had left messages after the bleeps, ranging from the conciliatory ‘Can’t we have lunch and discuss the whole thing sensibly?’ to the threatening ‘If you won’t withdraw your story at once, I shall be compelled to take steps to silence you!’ Then he had persuaded himself that Gavin was at home, hiding behind his answering machine. He took the tube to Bayswater and sat in an empty carriage, solitary between rush hours, thinking of the endless combinations of threats and promises which he might use to extricate his life from Gavin’s plotting and return to the safety of his loneliness.

  A sudden dry wind had sprung up, rattling the privet and untended laurels in the garden of the Bayswater square which had not yet been gentrified, where the stucco on the tall buildings was peeling, where there was no white paint or window-boxes or brightly coloured front doors and where a multitude of bells showed that no house was occupied by a single family.

  Cars were parked outside the address Felix had in his pocket, among them a battered van with Epsilon Books painted on the back door. Suddenly convinced that Gavin had just driven up and was sitting in the van, Felix, the low afternoon sun in his eyes, stepped off the pavement and pulled at the handle of the driver’s door. Stumbling on the edge of the pavement, he steadied himself with his other hand on the side window. Then he saw that the van was empty and he looked up at the gaunt façade of 9 Carisbrooke Terrace, the home of the man whose single leisure-time activity seemed to be the persecution of Felix Morsom. A woman in a sari, loaded with plastic supermarket bags, was trudging up the cracked steps to the front door and Felix followed her up to the fourth floor. He watched her go into her flat and then found himself alone on the landing, the wind blowing through an open window. He heard a creak and turned to see that the door of number 5 had been left open. He walked into Gavin’s flat.

  What struck him was the sad tidiness of the place. A couch and two armchairs covered in imitation leather were set at perfect right angles. There was a table on which four magazines the – Bookseller, Publishers Weekly, Exchange and Mart and Hello! – were in similar order. Beside them, on a lace doily, stood a small glass version of Hans Andersen’s mermaid. The DIY bookshelves, assembled with rigorous efficiency, held telephone directories, a wide selection of The World’s Hundred Best-known Titles in their uniform green bindings, and hardback copies of Felix Morsom’s books including Out of Season. On the mantelpiece stood a pink china shepherdess, a box of matches in an embroidered cover and a framed studio photograph of Miriam, softened and slightly blurred, looking, in this instance, like someone who used to introduce children’s programmes on television.

  The door to the bedroom was also open, the bed neatly made: the only sign of carelessness being a cupboard door open to show a tweed jacket, a number of anoraks, odd trousers and a blue suit swinging on a wire coathanger. In the kitchen the sparse equipment was in place except for a mug decorated with the god Pan sporting a huge erection and the inscription EPSILON’S HISTORY OF EROTICA, which had been left half full of milky tea on the draining-board. Influenced by the order of the kitchen, or with nothing better to do, he poured the cold tea away down the sink, rinsed out the cup and put it in the plate-rack beside the taps.

  Felix went back to the sitting-room, where he sat for a long time. The phone rang once and he expected a message which was not delivered. Then he wrote an angry note on the back of Miss Trigg’s yellow paper: ‘Don’t think you can get away with this. I’ll be back. Felix Morsom.’ He left the note between the pink shepherdess and the portrait photograph of Miriam Bowker.

  Down in the entrance hall the woman in the sari was seeing off a visitor, a grey-haired man carrying a briefcase. She looked up for a moment with large brown eyes from under a wide brow with a caste mark. He was struck by her beauty and then left Carisbrooke Terrace. Much later, when at home, he checked his answering machine but nobody had called him, nor did Gavin Piercey ever ring him back.

  It was almost midnight when a woman’s scream could be heard in Carisbrooke Terrace. Cries and the shrill call of burglar alarms were so common in that part of London that no lights went on, nor were windows opened. A little later, in answer to a 999 call made from the box on the corner, a police car arrived with its blue lights flashing. Miriam Bowker was standing beside the Epsilon van in which the driver had clearly been struck about the head and face with a heavy object, which was found to have fractured his skull, broken his nose and reduced his features to pulp. The weapon used, which might have been a heavy spanner or jack handle, was never recovered.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘It’s down to the kids in my opinion. It’s a little-known fact that 69 per cent of violent crime in this area is down to the under-twelves. Make our job a whole lot easier if they went to school in cuffs and were locked up at night!’ The speaker was Detective Sergeant Wathen, a lean, hatchet-faced, balding man who spoke in complaining tones and would tell anyone at Paddington Green nick who cared to listen that some daft, homosexual judge in the family division had given custody of his three children to his mentally defective wife. His own kids, who calmly walked off with more than half his wages, were no doubt mixed up with other under-twelves who spent their days doing drugs and their nights mugging old ladies.

  ‘I don’t believe an under-twelve battered a publisher’s rep to death in a Ford van in Bayswater. I hardly believe that’s possible.’ Detective Chief Inspector Elizabeth Cowling, who was examining police photographs, smiled tolerantly. She knew that Detective Sergeant Wathen hated and resented her, not only because she was his superior officer but because she was a woman and, as such, capable of gaining the custody of children and robbing innocent and unsuspecting police officers of their money.

  ‘Well, now, Chief.’ Wathen flicked through the pages of his notebook, using the word ‘Chief with patronizing contempt as a man might call his wife ‘Blue Eyes’ when he thought she wasn’t very bright. ‘The deceased has been identified as Gavin Piercey, male, white, five foot eight inches. Papers on the body show him to have been a publisher’s representative, flat 5, 9 Carisbrooke Terrace, Bayswater.’

  ‘I know all that, Frank,’ Elizabeth Cowling said.

  ‘Death di
scovered by a Miss Miriam Bowker who had an engagement to meet the deceased and, getting no answer to his bell, looked casually into the van. Appeared to be genuinely horrified by what she saw and was able to identify the deceased in spite of considerable facial injuries. Unless further inquiries show otherwise, there seems no reason to regard Miss Bowker as a suspect. In any case this is not a crime of the type likely to be committed by a woman.’

  ‘Or a twelve-year-old child.’

  ‘Some of those twelve year olds are bloody strong, Chief. Believe you me. Some of those fucking twelve year olds have highly developed minds, which they get through living on the fat of some poor bugger’s alimony.’

  At this point Detective Constable Newbury entered the room, a small, sandy-haired and eager man dressed in a tweed jacket, jeans and an open-necked shirt. He brought with him the tapes from Gavin’s answering machine, which he fitted up for the Chief to hear. She was going over the notes made by the scene of the crime officer as Detective Sergeant Wathen droned on: ‘“It has been revealed that a custodial sentence was once passed on the deceased by the West London Magistrates for non-payment of maintenance due to Miss Bowker’s infant son Ian.” Vultures, some women when they get a court order behind them! “But the matter has since been resolved when it was established that the deceased was not, in fact, the father of said infant.” I wish I knew his bloody lawyer! “And

  Miss Bowker states that she and the deceased were now the best of friends and put all that behind them!” ’