‘Do be quiet a minute, Frank.’ The Chief gave him her beaming schoolmistress smile and seemed about to add, ‘There’s a good little boy.’ Instead she said, ‘I do want to listen to this.’ Detective Constable Newbury pressed a switch and a voice filled the room with messages ranging from the conciliatory ‘Can’t we have lunch and discuss this whole thing sensibly?’ to the distinctly threatening ‘If you won’t withdraw your story at once, I shall be compelled to take steps to silence you!’ When the machine had been switched off the Chief said, ‘I just can’t believe it.’
‘What can’t you believe now, my dear?’ Detective Sergeant Wathen was at his least bearable.
‘He simply doesn’t write like that.’
‘Who doesn’t write like what?’
‘I mean, his books are all about sensitive people in situations which are only, well, just hinted at. I can’t believe he’d ever write a sentence like “I shall be compelled to take steps to silence you!” ’
‘You know who that is?’
‘Oh yes, I’m sure I do. We had an extremely agreeable lunch together.’
Felix didn’t take the Meteor. In fact he had given up opening newspapers altogether in case he should trip over an unexpected and adverse review of Out of Season. He did, however, buy the Meteor at the sweetshop by the entrance to the pier because he feared that WELL-KNOWN AUTHOR’S LOVE-CHILD might be the morning’s feature. He didn’t open it at once but carried it to the end of the pier as someone charged with defusing a bomb might first move it to a remote place believing that there the explosion would do less damage.
So he sat staring down at the yellowish water slurping against the supports of the pier, in the company of a single fisherman who seemed to have been long ago resigned to catching nothing, holding the unopened Meteor in some considerable anxiety. And then he heard a sound like approaching cavalry and the boards shook as Huw Hotchkiss came round the comer wearing trainers, a purple tracksuit and a white baseball cap. He thundered to a stop, grabbed the Meteor and said, ‘My God, Felix! Have you seen the paper?’
‘You mean’ – Felix’s mouth was dry and his voice filled with apprehension – ‘about my love-child?’
‘No.’ Huw was turning the pages which, buffeted by the wind, were trying to escape from his hands. ‘Why should it be about your love-child? We’re all glad about your love-child. I told Sheena, my present partner whom you’ve never met, and she was really chuffed you’d got a love-child. We all rejoice with you, boyo, from the bottom of our hearts. But one love-child more or less in the world is hardly earth-shaking news, is it?’
‘That’s exactly what I think.’
‘And you’re hardly the sort of chap that’s always in the papers. Sorry about that review in the Guardian, by the way. Sheena wanted me to make it clear our hearts went out to you. No, nothing about you in the paper today. Not even a stinking review. It’s about – ’
‘About what?’
‘Well, that weird character that tried to muscle into my course of lectures on the Moving Image. What was his name? I remembered when I saw it in the paper. Here you are. Piercey!’ And Huw slapped the Meteor so that a small paragraph of home news could be pushed in front of Felix’s eyes: PUBLISHER’S REP FOUND DEAD IN LONDON SQUARE. Gavin Piercey, 31, was found with severe head injuries in his van it said and added, after very little further information, that the police were looking for a man who might be able to help with their inquiries. ‘It must be the same chap, mustn’t it?’ Huw said. ‘The right age and all that?’
‘Yes,’ Felix told him, ‘it must be the same chap.’
‘I thought he was extremely weird, but you can’t help feeling sorry for the bloke. These sort of ghosts’ – Huw was unexpectedly poetical – ‘come looming up at you out of the past.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Take you, for instance.’
‘What about me?’
‘I thought you’d never want to speak to me again. The years went by and I never heard a word. And then you sought me out. It did my heart good, boyo, that you should seek me out and offer me your forgiveness.’
‘I wanted to ask you about Miriam Bowker.’
‘So you did! I well remember that that was the reason you gave but I read the message in your eyes, old son, and they spelled out very clearly “I forgive you, Huw. Shake hands on it and no hard feelings.” ’
‘Did they?’
‘And that Miriam girl. She came looming up out of the past, also. Called in, she did, at the private address of me and Sheena.’
‘She what?’
‘Like you she was asking about that barbecue on the beach. Wanted to know if I had kept any photographs of the occasion. Particularly interested in who might have been in occupation of the airbed. I told her very frankly that it was all lost in the mists of time. But I promised to look for snaps.’
‘Did she leave you’ – Felix was almost afraid to ask – ‘with any sort of an address?’
‘This is Sheena, my partner. Felix Morsom, a very old friend. Sheena’s been dying to meet you. I’ve told her so much about you. I’m always talking about Felix, aren’t I, Sheena?’
‘So far as I remember you’ve never mentioned his name.’ A gigantic girl, at least a foot taller than the squat Huw, stood by the window in his house in Coldsands Old Town with a comb in her hand, searching for split ends. She was blonde and looked like a goddess in an over-life-sized statue which had suffered from the passage of time. ‘Huw’s such a bloody liar! Aren’t you, Huw?’
‘I knew you two would get on like a house on fire!’ Huw was smiling as though he had been paid the highest compliment. ‘Felix is interested in that girl, Miriam Bowker.’
‘Just if you’ve got an address,’ Felix reminded him.
‘Here somewhere.’ Huw was searching on a desk piled high with letters, bills, books, video tapes and other visual aids to the study of the cinema. ‘You remember Miriam, the girl who came here, don’t you, Sheena?’
‘It’s none of my business who comes and goes.’ Sheena turned to look, with great interest, on to an empty street where nothing in particular was going on.
‘She wanted to know if I had any pictures of a party I gave on the beach. Years ago. A party where Felix was definitely the star.’
‘It was such a relief to us all,’ Sheena spoke loudly to the street below, ‘when you gave up having parties.’
‘Got it!’ Huw, who had been burrowing among his possessions, announced the find.
‘Thank God for that! Now perhaps we can have a moment’s peace.’ And Sheena went on with the close examination of her hair.
So Felix started to walk home with Miriam’s address and phone number in his pocket, hoping that calling on her wouldn’t reach such a terrible and unlooked for conclusion as his visit to her friend Gavin. And he walked along the promenade towards Imperial Parade, past the small hotels boarded up and bankrupt for lack of business, and the souvenir shops with their postcards, Union Jacks, baseball caps and COLDSANDS WARM HEARTS T-shirts, past the small, smelly aquarium and the plump statue of King Edward VII, past the sea sucking away at the dark sand and the gulls screaming as they battled against the wind – the permanent backdrop to his life and novels. He thought he should be relieved that his unaccountable enemy was silenced at last and, in that awful and dramatic way, had done what Felix wanted. But as he walked into the wind he couldn’t help feeling sorry for Gavin.
His father and his wife had long been the only dead people he’d known well and now they were joined, inexplicably, by Gavin Piercey. Gavin had forced himself into his life, dogged him, badgered him, bothered him, puzzled him and persecuted him. There had been moments, perhaps too many moments, when he felt like killing Gavin himself. Yet condemnation came hard to Felix. Perhaps this strange, over-serious, lonely figure who had been ill-treated and misjudged genuinely thought he had found Ian’s father? Felix remembered the too tidy pathetic flat in Bayswater. He remembered, almost with gratitude, the line of
Morsom hardbacks, starting with his first, The End of the Pier, which had been so well received that his father, overcome with envy and regret, had refused to read it. As he reached Imperial Parade, and the point where he had watched the arrival of Miriam Bowker and Ian, he was doing his best to think well of Gavin.
And then he saw, parked outside his front door, an unmarked car driven by a policewoman in uniform. On the front step, ringing at his bell, he saw a tall, bald, hatchet-faced man accompanied by a smaller assistant who was – and the phrase came back to him like a punch in the stomach – ‘dressed casual’. He walked quickly back across the road and, almost running down a number of side-streets, made his way to the railway station and caught a slow train to London.
Chapter Eleven
Felix saw Ian Bowker trudging towards him, carrying a small, purple games bag, apparently just home from school. He said, ‘Hullo, Ian,’ but the boy didn’t answer. He said, ‘School’s over, then?’ which was a question he agreed might not call for any further comment. He said, ‘I’ve just come to see your mother.’
‘That lift hasn’t worked for weeks,’ Ian told him.
The tower block was behind the dwindling pubs and shops at the World’s End, the last gasp of the King’s Road. The concrete stairs had been littered, peed on and seemed to Felix, who took little exercise, almost terminally exhausting. The stained walls were liberally decorated with graffiti, among which swastikas and other advertisements for racism predominated. When they got to a door on the fifth floor, Ian opened it with a key which he kept hanging round his neck under his navy-blue pullover.
They walked into what seemed to be a single, all-purpose room which couldn’t have been a greater contrast to the demented tidiness of the late Gavin Piercey’s home. There was a bed which might have been no more than a mattress on the floor; it was so covered with clothes, shoes, shirts, stockings, a huge plastic bucket of dirty washing and the remains of a takeaway meal for two that it couldn’t be identified. Other clothes were on hangers dangling from a broom handle fixed between the end of a curtain rail and a comer wall. There was a sink with a bowl full of unwashed dishes, a stained cooker and a green glass vase in which a lavish bouquet of roses and lilies had long since died. The dirty plates on the draining-board seemed to be stuck together. Yellowing magazines and newspapers were stacked against a wall which was otherwise decorated with Ian’s school reports, pinned up, and a long, school photograph in which he could, no doubt, be identified by anyone with the time and patience to look. The surprising thing about this tip was that it didn’t smell disgusting.
Miriam Bowker was wearing a high-necked sweater and jeans. Her hair was cut in a fringe and combed straight down, so that she looked like a French café singer of the sixties. She was watching a blurred quiz show on a portable television set propped on a pile of clothing on the bed. Its aerial had been adapted from a wire coathanger. When she turned and saw Felix, she looked terrified.
Later she said, ‘It was the most horrible thing that ever happened. I’ve never seen anyone dead before.’
Ian said, ‘Quiet, Mum! I’m doing my homework.’ He was reading a book, his head pillowed on one arm, his spectacled eyes very near the page. Miriam said, ‘If you don’t want to listen to us, Ian, please go to your room.’
‘What are you reading, Ian?’ Felix felt sorry for the boy who had been ordered out.
‘A book called Where’s My Left Sock?’
‘I don’t believe it!’
‘It’s by Sonia Foot.’
There was a moment’s stunned silence. Miriam looked unforgiving. Then Felix laughed. In fact he thought it was quite funny.
‘I read another one.’ Ian gazed solemnly at their visitor. ‘How to Make Easy Money.’
‘Who wrote that, then?’
‘Robin Banks! And Falling off the Cliff by . . .’
‘That’s quite enough of that.’ Miriam was running out of patience. ‘Please go to your room. I won’t ask again.’
‘. . . Eileen Dover. I’m bored with my room.’ Felix had seen it and knew what he meant. Ian had been given the only bedroom but, apart from a single bed, it looked unfurnished. Stuck to the wall was a small author photograph cut from the dust-jacket of Out of Season. The sight of it filled Felix with fear and embarrassment but also a strange gratitude. Miriam had found the remains of a bottle of white Rioja in her fridge and he was given what seemed to be the only glass. She was drinking out of a cup and had become calm. He asked, ‘You went to see Gavin?’
‘He’d asked me round.’
‘What for?’
‘You’re as bad as the police!’ When she smiled he thought she looked momentarily attractive. He didn’t mind the forward-looking teeth; her top lip no longer seemed to be pulled back in any kind of sneer. ‘He wanted to talk.’
‘What about?’
‘He said about you being after him all the time. Trying to get at him.’
‘I thought it was the other way round. He was always after me. Did you tell the police that?’
‘He said you went after him at his work. Yes, I had to tell them the truth.’
‘I suppose you did.’ He took a gulp of the cold white wine which did little to steady his nerves. ‘I was there a few nights ago. I couldn’t find him. I kept on ringing. . .’
‘I was there the night before last. I’m afraid I did find him.’
‘How?’
‘Ian? Please, darling. Will you finish your homework in your room?’
‘All right! Ian shouted with unexpected rage. He slapped his books together, took a long time filling his pencil-case and then banged the door as he left them. Miriam said, ‘He didn’t answer the bell so, for some reason, I thought I’d look inside the van.’
‘What time was this?’
‘Oh, late. Past eleven o’clock.’
‘So it was dark?’
‘Yes. I suppose that’s why no one noticed him before.’
‘You were out at eleven?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who was looking after Ian?’
‘Ian looks after himself. Why are you asking me all these questions?’
‘Someone killed Gavin. I just wondered who.’
She was looking at him, no longer smiling. ‘Yes. I wonder who it was.’
‘The van wasn’t locked?’
‘No. But I could see inside it. He’d fallen over the steering-wheel. There was blood. I could see so much blood.’ She said it calmly, still looking at him. ‘I went to a call-box and rang the police.’
‘It must have been terrible for you.’
‘Pretty terrible. Particularly when I had to go with them to identify Gavin. I don’t know why they needed that. It was his van. He had his driving licence, all his stuff in his pockets. I don’t know why they had to put me through that at all.’ She got up and searched the room for a cigarette, found the last Marlboro in a jacket swinging from the broom handle and lit it by switching on the gas cooker, holding back her hair to save it from the flame. As she straightened up, she said, ‘Are you hungry at all, Felix?’
He didn’t answer but said, ‘Who could have done that to him? Did Gavin have enemies?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t know him all that well.’
‘You didn’t know him all that well and you said he was the father of your child?’ It was, as he had suspected, an accusation she flung at the merest acquaintances.
‘I knew him. Of course I knew him. When we were all young. When we all hung round the university.’
‘And you slept with him?’
‘If you call it sleeping. He was enthusiastic, Gavin was.’ She laughed. ‘You could say that for him. Over-enthusiastic at times.’
Felix felt a moment of embarrassment for the dead Gavin and was angered at Miriam’s laughter. ‘Made up in enthusiasm for what he lacked in experience. You could put it like that,’ she said.
‘And afterwards?’
‘He kept in touch. I didn’t want him to particularly. Christmas
. Always remembered my birthday and Ian’s. Helped me out from time to time, I’ve got to admit it.’
‘So you shopped him to PROD?’
‘Did Gavin tell you that?’
‘As good as.’
‘They were on at me to name a father. On and on. Remorseless. I had to give them a name. I gave them his.’
‘Not mine?’
‘I didn’t want to cause you trouble.’
‘But you changed your mind?’
‘Because of what they did to Gavin. Locking him up. That wasn’t fair.’
‘So you lied to get him out of trouble?’
‘I had Ian to consider. So I told them the truth.’
‘Even if it happened. Even if anything like that happened’ – he was standing up, but keeping his voice down, remembering the silent boy behind the door – ‘on a lilo. On the beach. Once. Why should that mean . . . ?’
‘Because I knew. I knew as soon as it was over. That’s it, I thought. Women always know.’
‘Women don’t!’
‘In your books they might not. I know what I felt. None better.’
‘And all these years. You’ve never said a word.’
‘Like I said I didn’t want to worry you.’
‘Worry me? Do you know what I saw? Today? Policemen. Two of them at my front door. Remember what happened to Gavin? Two men came to arrest me. Because of Ian.’
There was a long silence and then she said, ‘I don’t think it was because of Ian.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I think it was because of Gavin. You want to stay and talk about it? Why don’t you buy your little family a Chinese meal?’
His mind raced through the past weeks. Sometimes it seemed like days, sometimes years, since he had listened to Gavin’s tape. As he talked, Miriam became gentler and he found it harder to maintain his anger. It had, after all, she explained, been Gavin’s idea to finger Felix to PROD. She had gone along with it, she said, but always reluctantly and with Ian’s best interests at heart. And, once the suggestion was made, of course, she understood why he denied it. Anyone would have wanted to meet Gavin, to have it out with him, to come, perhaps, to some sensible compromise. That wasn’t suspicious. In Miriam’s opinion that wasn’t enough to make him a suspect in the matter of Gavin’s unusual and sudden death.
Felix in the Underworld Page 8