Felix in the Underworld

by John Mortimer

  Gavin, or the ghost of Gavin, had not, Felix was sure, been wearing his inevitable blue business suit. His legs were encased in grey, shapeless material, perhaps the bottom of a tracksuit, and he wore a maroon anorak which, when he turned, had a dangling hood like a monk’s. Felix ran out of Victoria Street with no idea whether to start up towards the park or down towards the river. Either way seemed equally hopeful or hopeless. Then he remembered that Gavin had told him at an author event which now seemed to have taken place long ago and in another life that he knew what it was to doss down in doorways. One of the sayings of Felix’s father, words of warning or advice which he heard echoing from his childhood, was that more people could be found sleeping on the Embankment because they didn’t lead out trumps. In his childhood, before he knew much of London, he had a picture of a high sandbank in front of a dark sea, with crowds of ragged and penniless card-players sleeping on it. He knew that the Embankment was where people bedded down for the night so he turned towards it.

  He was still running past sleeping blocks of flats and offices, past a dark Chinese restaurant and a lit shop window in which brightly coloured fish swam lazily and pointlessly under a notice, Tasteful Tropicals. Halfway down Victoria Street a man lurched out of the darkness and collided with Felix who apologized profusely. The man shouted, ‘Idiot! You know how many cells you had in your brain the day you were born? Three hundred thousand, would you believe it?’ Felix was looking across the road. He could be sure he saw, far down on the other side of the street, in the cold glare of another light, a figure in a maroon anorak which was not running but strutting very rapidly, with its elbows tucked into its sides as though in a walking race. When he tried to move away he found the expert on brain cells attached to his arm. ‘And how many have you got left today? How many, my friend? Let me tell you. Precisely three!’ As the man started to laugh, Felix shook him off and ran across the road but somewhere down a side-street or in a doorway the maroon anorak was hiding from him.

  At the end of Victoria Street, before he caught sight of the stone fretwork of the Abbey, Felix saw letters on a glass door: PARENTAL RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS DEPARTMENT. High above it there still seemed to be lights in several windows. Were they at work all night, ruthlessly pursuing careless, delinquent and disappearing fathers? He had no time to worry about them. Soon, he was sure, somewhere by the Sphinx and Cleopatra’s Needle, on a bench or a wall, or under a black lamp-post with an iron dolphin twisted about it, he would see Gavin for a third time and be out of danger. He went on, sometimes running, sometimes walking, filled with the single-minded enthusiasm he felt when he hit on a watertight plot, a workable story and had only to summon up his strength and keep going to achieve some sort of success. The idea would become reality as it did when he passed Cleopatra’s Needle and found, near Waterloo Bridge, what he now knew would be there.

  He saw a parked Volvo Estate with its back open. A red-haired man wearing a dark suit and a dog-collar was pouring something steaming from an urn. Two women were helping him hand out food and drink to a collection of shadowy, ghostlike figures. Felix saw only one colour among them: a man in a maroon anorak was warming his hands on a mug.

  They couldn’t have been more than twenty-five yards apart when the man in the anorak, the possibly dead man, the murdered man, turned and they looked at each other silently, because now they were so near Felix was silenced. He heard the muted roar of a bus which had stopped on the other side of the road and, as the lights changed, it now started to lumber off. The maroon anorak flickered towards it and the man jumped on to the bus and was carried away, leaving Felix standing.

  He didn’t feel helpless, however. He was determined. He walked across to the comer of Savoy Gardens, shut himself carefully into a telephone kiosk and made a transfer charge call to the legal adviser who had promised to put out the red carpet for him if he was ever in trouble on a charge of murder.

  Although Septimus had poured a certain amount of cold water on his defence Felix was not discouraged. Gavin, if it could be Gavin, was moving around London at night, going down to the Embankment for a snack, sleeping in doorways. He would find him again, track him as he had from Victoria Station. Meanwhile Felix was unexpectedly hungry.

  ‘Homeless?’ The smiling, carrot-haired vicar approached Felix with a steaming mug and a sandwich.

  ‘Well, in a manner of speaking.’ He didn’t know how best to explain the situation.

  ‘Because this is EMH. Sorry, Embankment Meals for the Homeless.’

  ‘Well, yes I am. Quite homeless.’

  ‘Looking at your clothes -’ the vicar was anxious – ‘they hardly look slept in.’

  ‘Stolen.’ Felix found an immediate explanation for his cashmere sweater.

  ‘Well, of course I understand. My name is Brian.’ The vicar handed him the homeless meal. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘Gavin.’ Felix had an absurd idea that the vicar would say, No. You’re not Gavin. Gavin was here ten minutes ago and took a bus to the hostel at Centre Point – or pass on some such valuable information but he only nodded understandingly. ‘Greetings, Gavin. I recognize that you have as much right to our love and concern as those with four walls and a mortgage. We’re up from Dorking every night, me and my sturdy volunteers. You only have to see us and ask.’

  Felix stood among the shadows. Now he could see them more clearly. There was a short fat man who wore a bobble hat, a raincoat and woollen gloves and an unusually tall witchlike woman with a cloud of dark hair who was holding a sandwich very close to her face and sniffing at it with deep suspicion. Behind them, frowning ominously, there was a huge ox of a young man, his fist clenched round a mug, his jaws working with what seemed quite unnecessary vigour. Felix took a gulp

  of some hot, dark, anonymous fluid and looked up from it, puzzled.

  ‘It’s like a blind tasting, isn’t it?’ The man in the bobble hat spoke in a high, precise voice. ‘Impossible to tell if it’s tea or coffee.’

  ‘It’s soup!’ The vicar looked young and smiled industriously. The gawky woman said, ‘I don’t touch it. I hear you put softeners in it, to damp down our urges.’ Felix thought she was probably mad. ‘You shouldn’t spread such rumours, Peggy,’ the vicar told her, ‘when you know they’re not true.’

  ‘What’s in this sandwich, then?’ Peggy’s question was an accusation.

  ‘It’s a sort of veggie spread, which I personally find quite delicious.’

  ‘I reckon I’ll wait for the prawn and mayo.’ Peggy threw her sandwich over her shoulder, in the way people throw spilled salt to scare away the devil. ‘I’ll wait till they bring round the chuck-outs from Marks & Spencer, thank you very much. I’ve not long finished the funny curry those Hari Krishnas bring round and it’s lying heavy on my stomach.’

  Felix looked across the road. An anonymous car had stopped by the kiosk where he had made his transfer charge call. He saw the bald head of the plain-clothes officer emerge, tortoiselike, from the passenger seat, then the driver appeared, casually dressed. They opened the door of the telephone box and stood looking into it for a long time, as though to make sure it was empty. When they crossed the road to speak to the vicar and the shadows, Felix had left as quickly and as silently as possible.

  He felt safe behind the shrubs in Savoy Gardens. He stood and saw, through the bushes, the bald policeman showing the vicar a newspaper–the Meteor, he felt sure–and the photograph illustrating Lucasta’s article. Then, to his surprise, the Furies got back into their car and drove away. The vicar and his helpers were packing up the Volvo. Felix longed for sleep and felt detached, as though none of the unthinkable things that might happen to him would matter any more.

  Outside the river entrance of the Savoy a late party in black ties and long dresses were shouting at each other and laughing. Felix stepped out of the headlights of the car which crawled to pick them up. There was a gust of wind and he felt rain in his face. He took shelter under the arches behind Shell Mex House and found himself in
what looked like a long dormitory. On the hne of stone seats, the sleeping-bags and cardboard-box bedheads were laid out. It was a dry place, full of middle-aged people, mainly men, who had arranged their few possessions as carefully as sailors or monks. Many of them had transistors going at full blast and they were reading paperbacks or the Evening Standard, with a puff of cigarette smoke, like a campfire, marking each position. Felix saw an empty marble slab with nothing on it but an empty cardboard box and sat, leaning his back against the wall. Then he wondered where else he might have been that night. His house was surely being watched, as was Miriam’s. He had absolutely no desire to meet Brenda Bodkin’s boyfriend. He ruled out Huw Hotchkiss as a host. There were a few women he had slept with in Coldsands and London, but they were married now and some had children, and he doubted if they’d have welcomed a murder suspect late at night in their family circle. Tubal-Smith of Llama Books had him to dinner occasionally in his Hampstead house but how would he react to a call from a potential criminal? Fergus Campion, his Llama editor, was a serious young man with a turned-down mouth, thin hair pulled back in a pony-tail, and a disconcerting smell of antiseptic. He disapproved of so many things from motor cars and the consumption of animal fats to smoking and calling God ‘He’, that Felix doubted if the house he shared with a partner in Tufnell Park would provide sanctuary for an author on the run from a murder rap. It was far better to stay where he was.

  He thought of what the novelist Trigorin said in The Seagull: ‘We will talk about my splendid, bright life. Well, where shall we begin? I am haunted night and day by one persistent thought. I ought to be writing. I ought to be writing. I ought . . . What is splendid and bright in that, I ask you? Oh, it is an absurd life!’ Night and day, also, the same thoughts, the obsession and the guilt, had haunted Felix. Since pursuing Gavin, and being pursued by his own Furies, he hadn’t felt the need to write anything. Under an archway, among those who do their best to forget, his heavy eyelids drooped and his world became blank.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘This is more or less an informal chat, Miriam. Just to go through the statement you have made and matters arising. You have cooperated hereto, I say that in all honesty, and let’s hope this will continue.’ In spite of the informality, Detective Sergeant Wathen had not removed his raincoat and had refused what was left of the bottle of sake, when, earlier that evening, he had visited the flat at World’s End.

  The living-room was unnaturally tidy. Miriam was wearing a black T-shirt and dark glasses. She seemed to be in mourning. She sat on a hard chair by the lamp. Ian was at the table doing his homework and sighing heavily when anyone spoke. Detective Sergeant Wathen was perched on the front of an armchair with broken springs and a seat with leaking stuffing. His Detective Constable, who chose not to recline on a purple beanbag and preferred to stand, was holding his notebook at the ready.

  ‘I rather gathered from your statement that the deceased, whose body you identified, had been with you in an intimate relationship?’

  ‘Had been. Yes.’

  ‘You’d had a sexual connection, hadn’t you, Miriam?’

  ‘Had, in the past.’ Miriam found the bald officer’s use of her Christian name not in the least comforting.

  ‘When you went to visit the deceased at the Carisbrooke Terrace address. . . ?’

  ‘Round Bayswater, yes.’

  ‘Round Bayswater, indeed. Was this a visit, Miriam, made for the purpose of sexual connection?’

  ‘Not specially.’

  ‘By that, I take it to mean sex was a possibility?’

  ‘I suppose everything’s possible in this world. I was extremely fond of Gavin.’ With her eyes hidden behind her black glasses, it was impossible to judge Miriam’s sincerity.

  ‘Everything’s possible in this world, you said. And I take it that would include sexual connection?’

  ‘I suppose so. Yes.’

  ‘Mum’ – Ian was exasperated – ‘I am trying to do my homework.’

  ‘Perhaps, in view of the lateness of the hour and the turn this interview is taking, the young lad should now withdraw?’

  ‘All right. Why don’t you go to your room, darling?’

  ‘Because I hate my room.’

  ‘I think you’d best run along . . .’ Detective Sergeant Wathen spoke in a terrifying fatherlike way to Ian and added, as a final insult, ‘Sonny.’ Ian rose slowly, packed his pencil-case even more slowly, gave the officer a look of withering contempt and departed.

  ‘Did that little lad’ – Wathen turned to Miriam after the slamming of Ian’s door had died away – ‘show much grief when he heard of Gavin Piercey’s death?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Ian doesn’t show much emotion.’

  ‘No emotion on hearing of the death,’ the Detective Sergeant repeated. ‘I’d like a note taken of that, Leonard.’ Detective Constable Newbury started, as though awaking from a dream. His taste ran to suntanned blondes with enormous tits. He couldn’t see why anyone would want to have sexual connection with Miriam Bowker. He wrote down ‘No emotion’.

  ‘Like father, like son.’ Wathen shook his head as though to say, Sad but true.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that, to quote your previous statement given in the presence of myself and Detective Constable Newbury, you are now satisfied that Felix Morsom is the father of the young lad Ian?’

  ‘Well, what about it?’

  ‘Bad breeding! That’s what’s about it, Miriam. In my view, it’s in the blood.’

  ‘What do you mean, bad breeding? Felix is an intelligent man. A well-known man. He writes books.’

  ‘Please. Don’t distress yourself unduly, Miriam. I’m not suggesting he doesn’t write books. However, I am suggesting that your Felix, whom we have not yet had the pleasure of meeting, is perfectly capable of a particularly brutal homicide. All I’m saying to you, Miriam, is watch out as far as the young lad’s concerned. It’s in the blood!’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me’ – Miriam pulled off the shades from her eyes, which were glistening with fury – ‘my little Ian’s capable of beating someone to death with a spanner?’

  ‘To be frank with you, Miriam, we’ve had children do considerably worse than that around the Paddington area, haven’t we, Leonard?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Far worse.’ The Detective Constable wanted, above all things, to sit down but didn’t know whether it would look right to collapse in Ian’s chair and nor did he wish to sit too close to Miriam.

  ‘I don’t believe he’d do that for a moment!’ Miriam was contemptuous. ‘And, what’s more, I don’t believe Felix would either.’

  ‘Then perhaps it would come as a surprise to you to know’

  Detective Sergeant Wathen was calmly triumphant – ‘that your precious Felix uttered death threats about the deceased Piercey in the presence of witnesses!’

  ‘I don’t believe that either.’

  ‘Entirely up to you.’ The Detective Sergeant seemed no longer interested in persuading her and put on his most formal expression. ‘I propose to ask you a number of supplementary questions to elucidate matters already referred to and I will ask Detective Constable Newbury to make a contemporaneous note. I take it’ – he returned to what seemed to be his favourite topic of conversation – ‘that you have had sexual connection with the man Morsom, whom I shall refer to as Felix for the remainder of this question and answer?’

  ‘Well, seeing as Ian is in that room doing his prep’ – Miriam’s tone was icy – ‘I rather think so.’

  ‘And when did such a connection last occur? Give me the date approximately.’

  ‘About eleven years ago. On the beach at a place called Coldsands.’

  ‘On the sands?’ Detective Constable Newbury asked, as though amazed.

  ‘On an inflatable mattress, if you want the full details.’

  ‘The full details’ – the Detective Sergeant’s voice was now drained of all expression – ‘will not be necessary. And when did
you last see Felix?’

  Detective Constable Newbury wrote: ‘After a short pause Miriam Bowker said, “When I went to Coldsands a few weeks ago to introduce him to his son Ian.” Detective Sergeant Wathen said, “Have you not seen him since then?” And the witness answered, “No.”’

  ‘Felix was last heard of on the Thames Embankment area making a phone call to his defence lawyer. There, you see, Miriam, I’m laying my cards out on the table. Face upwards. He’s not far from here. Not far, you might say, down the river. If you see him or if he makes any attempt to get in touch . . .’

  ‘Yes. Then what?’ Miriam was still angry.

  ‘Then you will contact us at Paddington Green immediately. My DC will leave a telephone number which I will ask you to keep by you at all times. That right, Leonard?’

  ‘And if I don’t?’ Miriam challenged him.

  Detective Sergeant Wathen sucked air through his teeth and shook his head again. ‘If you don’t’ – he looked sad – ‘we may have to change our view of your own involvement, Miriam.’ He stood up, turned and dusted down the back of his raincoat with his hand, as though to get rid of any spillage from the armchair. ‘And, if you take my advice, you’ll see that young lad is not out roaming the streets after five. This is not an official warning, as yet.’

  After the police officers had gone, Miriam let Ian out of retreat. ‘If that bald-headed bastard ever comes in here again, don’t you say a word to him!’

  In the car Detective Constable Newbury said, ‘I wonder how she knew it was a spanner?’

  ‘That, Leonard’ – the superior officer gave the ghost of a smile to indicate, quite falsely, that it was something he had noticed himself – ‘is a question you may well ask.’