Felix in the Underworld

by John Mortimer

‘I’ll take you home.’

  She used back ways and short cuts for getting out of London. Then she avoided the motorways, but drove fast down dual carriageways and through straggling, endless suburbs and small towns from which the charm had been resolutely removed by urban developers. They were heading for the sea, the flaking white paint and the windswept pier of the place he lived in, had known and wrote about – the world of Felix Morsom.

  ‘I never guessed. I was wrong all the way. Right up to the end. I thought it was Terry who’d killed Gavin. So you think that poor Terry . . . ?’

  ‘Battered to death in a van. Dead with his pockets full of Gavin’s papers. Falsely identified as Gavin by the only witness they had time to bother with – Gavin’s girlfriend. Buried under the name of the man he hated . . .’

  ‘Not a nice way to go. But when did you guess?’

  ‘Well, it was pretty odd when I saw him on the Embankment. And then everyone told me I was dotty, or it was not God’s way, or it was a defence that would do me more harm than good, and I began to doubt, seriously doubt, if it wasn’t some kind of dream. And then, when I’d been banged up long enough, I began not to care.’

  ‘But you didn’t give up hope?’

  ‘I’ve never given up hope about one thing.’

  ‘Getting acquitted?’

  ‘No, getting you. I’ve never given up hope about that.’

  ‘Not much good in hoping for me if you were doing life.’

  ‘Why ever not? I might have got an open prison. You’re allowed connubial visits. Wouldn’t an open prison count as abroad?’

  ‘Hardly.’

  They had stopped at lunchtime in a country pub. At least from the outside it looked like a country pub of the thatched and oak-beamed variety. Inside it had all the modern advantages of Indie music, flashing Space Invaders, plastic tabletops disguised as wood, electrically lit-up logs in the fireplace and kebabs and chips from the microwave. On this diet the landlady, who wore a low frilly top and the sort of checked cotton trousers favoured by clowns, had grown alarmingly stout.

  Irritated by the decor Brenda, when they ordered lunch, asked for a Ploughman’s Kebab. What she got was a pale, hairy, grey chicken leg in a basket. She nibbled at a chip and said, ‘So it’s all solved, the mystery.’

  ‘Not altogether. I guessed some of it.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I thought about the glasses. If there’d been a battered Gavin in the van, there’d’ve been shattered optical glass. The figure I’d seen on the Embankment was wearing glasses. Definitely.’

  ‘I thought Terry had gone to kill Gavin – or at least beat up the other father who’d shopped him to PROD.’

  ‘I think that’s what happened. They met at the reps’ knees-up in Ludgate Circus. Terry didn’t have a car. So he asked Gavin to give him a lift home.’

  ‘Gavin agreed? He gave a lift to the man he was scared of?’

  ‘Probably too scared to refuse: “Take me to Acton. Just a bit out of your way. On past Bayswater.” He was a big man, Terry. A big man with a heavy ring. When the car stopped, Terry told Gavin what he was going to do to him. Drunk, of course. Gavin must have got him pretty quickly, before he started.’

  ‘Got him with what?’

  ‘Something he had in the car – a spanner, a jack handle. I don’t know what. And I don’t expect he meant to kill him.’

  ‘You always think the best of people.’ Brenda looked displeased.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You forget. He made an unrecognizable mess of Terry.’

  ‘He had to, if he was going to turn him into a dead Gavin.’

  ‘Is that an excuse?’

  ‘Not an excuse. A reason.’

  Brenda shivered. ‘He did all that in his van. And no one noticed.’

  ‘Probably no one would’ve noticed if he did it in the street.

  Under a lamp-post. I imagine it happened when they stopped in Acton. Before Terry got out.’

  ‘You mean, outside Terry’s house?’ Brenda couldn’t believe it. ‘With his wife and children asleep? That’s what you imagine?’

  ‘That must have given Gavin the idea. There was a dead man in his van. All right, the dead man could be him. Gavin would never be caught because he was dead. He liked plots, Gavin did. He liked mysteries. He saw himself loitering in some safe limbo until the police gave up their inquiries and he could return as someone else entirely.’

  ‘So you think he drove the dead Terry back to Bayswater?’

  ‘And left him outside his flat. He had to, if Terry was going to be him. He took everything out of Terry’s pockets and put it in his own wallet – driving licence and stuff. Oh and he must have taken off Terry’s sphinx ring so he could give it to Miriam some time or other.’

  ‘That was horrible,’ Brenda said, as though the rest was all right.

  ‘Then he went upstairs. Lucky for him no one saw him. He changed his clothes and phoned Miriam to tell her to come and identify the body as him. That was one of the cruellest things he did. She must have been half mad to do it. Can I get you another drink?’

  He went to the bar and the landlady, when she had finished a lengthy phone call, slowly poured a draught Guinness for him and a glass of white wine for Brenda. When Felix asked her if she’d turn the music off, she asked, ‘Why on earth?’

  ‘We can’t hear ourselves speak.’

  ‘Our customers prefer the music.’ She seemed surprised. ‘It’s what they came out for. They get quite enough talking at home.’

  ‘All the same, we want to talk.’

  ‘You want to get intimate, you mean?’

  ‘At least some of us do.’

  ‘I’ll put it down a notch for you. That’s the best I can do. Any more and my husband’ll go bananas.’

  Felix didn’t like to say that he saw no sign of a husband, nor indeed of any other customers. Brenda had to pay for the drinks from Llama expenses. Tomorrow he could cash a cheque like an ordinary person. She said, ‘Didn’t Gavin take a ridiculous risk, hanging round the Llama party?’

  ‘Of course he’s a bit mad and beating Terry’s face in made him madder. In a way he must’ve felt he’d become Terry. He’d got Terry’s car as probably the keys were in the dead man’s pocket. He’d got Terry’s expenses by writing in to Llama. No doubt he knew Terry might win the prize and, if Terry’s wife collected it, he’d get it straight off her.’

  ‘By driving his car at her?’

  ‘By then he’d got used to killing.’ Felix finished his Guinness. ‘Is that what you imagine happened?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘It may not be true?’

  ‘Perhaps it wasn’t exactly like that.’

  ‘The truth may come out at the trial.’

  ‘If Gavin’s got Septimus Roache and Chipless defending him, I should think it’s extremely unlikely.’

  They sat in silence for a while as the image of the happenings in Gavin’s van slowly faded. Then Felix said, ‘Tomorrow, when I’m able to pay for things, can I take you out to dinner?’

  She didn’t answer that. Instead she asked, ‘When did you become sure?’

  ‘When I got the DNA report which said the child couldn’t have been Gavin’s. Of course it said that because they never tested Gavin’s blood.’

  She was leaning back in her chair, running her finger round the rim of her glass to make it sing. ‘You mean,’ she said, ‘it is Gavin’s child?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Felix said. ‘The author’s not all wise. The author doesn’t know everything. I don’t know who Ian’s father is. I only know it’s not me.’

  Coming over the Downs the distant sea was only a shade greyer than the sky. The fields were drenched in autumn rain. He said, ‘I’m dreading this.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘My house’ll be staked out. They’ll be poking cameras and microphones at me.’

  ‘No, they won’t.’

  ‘I’m afraid they will. It’s quite easy to get my
address. Why won’t they?’

  ‘I got my secretary to ring around. She told them you were going straight to stay with your publisher in Hampstead.’

  ‘Tubal-Smith?’

  ‘No less.’

  ‘Won’t he be furious?’

  ‘Of course not. He loves having his name dropped in the papers.’

  It was true. There was no one in front of the house, not even the elderly man from the Coldsands and District Argus. He could rely on her, everything she did for him worked.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re home. And I’d better get back to London.’

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Why not stay?’

  ‘You’re not pretending this is abroad?’

  ‘Why do we have to wait for that?’

  ‘Nothing ever stays the same. You can’t expect it to.’

  ‘So you feel differently. About me, I mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think I love you.’

  He felt a great wave of an unusual sensation he took for happiness. ‘So you will stay?’ he said.

  ‘No. So I won’t.’

  ‘Why ever?’

  ‘I used to say we’d done it in our heads, didn’t I?’ Her hands were caressing the steering-wheel and he dreaded what was to come. ‘Well, now we’ve done so much more. So much has happened. Terrible things for you. Extraordinary things for me. After all that . . . Well, are you sure it’s necessary? In that awful visiting-room I felt so close to you. Could we ever be closer than that?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘now the screws aren’t watching.’

  ‘Get out now,’ she said. ‘Go back to your work. That’s all you care about, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re all I care about. Some time, possibly . . . ?’

  ‘Everything’s possible.’ She turned her face towards him, and he kissed her small lips, dry as insects’ wings. Then she started the engine and he heard her drive away. He found the keys under a flowerpot where Mrs Ives had left them and opened the front door. No voice welcomed him. He felt completely alone.

  He walked into his writing-room and it was as it had been on the day he first heard Gavin’s voice on a tape. He looked down at his desk, at the pad of lined foolscap paper and the mug full of pens and pencils. He made sure that the metal duck full of paper-clips was directly in front of the clock presented to him by the public libraries of Sussex. He was about to straighten the glass paperweight with its view of the old Coldsands and then he caught sight of Chekhov. He felt ashamed of having borrowed the writer’s name and, not being able to face him, put the photograph away in a drawer.

  He had brought up a pile of letters which had grown by his front door. He looked at them without much interest but fished out an envelope marked OHMS and PROD. Placidity Jones had written again, standing in for Ken Savage who seemed to be permanently on holiday: ‘Since we have had no reply to our previous letter we must ask for an immediate settlement of monies due for the maintenance of the child Ian Bowker . . .’Well, that was an easy one. When he got round to it, he would send Placidity a copy of the DNA reports and his responsibility for Miriam’s child would be at an end for ever. Suddenly tired, he left the room to lie on his bed. There, curled up with the pillow round his ears, he fell into a deep sleep.

  It was dark when he woke up, put on his glasses and went back to his workroom. He was waiting for the guilt about not writing to return. The room seemed stuffy so he went to the window and pushed it open; he looked out, listening to the perpetual, reassuring sound of the sea.

  Then he saw on the pavement of the other side of the road, sitting on a bench under a street lamp, a familiar figure, waiting as though for a bus that never came.

  At least it had stopped raining when Felix stood under the light and the small, serious boy in glasses looked up at him. ‘Hullo, Dad,’ Ian said.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  ‘Teach the little buggers something about the countryside! Perhaps they’ll get to know that eggs don’t grow on trees, that bacon isn’t made in plastic packages ready for the Tesco’s freezer. Some of these mini-monsters have never seen grass, let alone a cow!’ Bob Weaver of the Sleary Road Children’s Home in South London was red-faced, explosive and tormented by conflicting emotions. He was genuinely concerned for the welfare of deprived and unfortunate children but, when it came to individual cases, children of all sorts irritated the hell out of him. They fell, in his experience, into two classes: the intolerably bumptious and the snivellingly self-pitying, and he was so torn between his duty to counsel and his longing to thump that he suffered permanent indigestion. His plan to get Miss O’Rourke to take these irritants off to visit the rural South Downs would get them out from under his feet.

  ‘Am I to take Ian?’ Miss O’Rourke spoke in a near whisper of plaintive compassion, which tempted Bob Weaver from time to time to thump her too. ‘Watch out,’ he reminded her. ‘Ian has violence in his record.’

  ‘Poor little lad,’ Miss O’Rourke said. ‘His mother’s done a runner. Left him high and dry. Vanished off the face of the earth.’

  Bob Weaver often wished that Ian would vanish also. Neither bumptious nor self-pitying, Ian Bowker had an unnerving way of staring at Mr Weaver, unblinking and for a long time, in an accusing sort of way. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘take Ian. And there’s no need to hurry back. Don’t just let them taste the bloody countryside, give them a real dose of the stuff.’ He planned to spend the afternoon in the Sleary Road Odeon where the latest American love story would blur his eyes with tears.

  So Ian went on an expedition to the South Downs and stood in the ticket office of the nature reserve looking at the goods on sale. There were calendars, address books and knicker-bags decorated with badgers, baby deer and the occasional owl; dishcloths, egg cups and animal-covered aprons. Miss O’Rourke was struggling to keep the army of Sleary Road children from mutiny when the usually silent Ian approached her with a rabbit-decorated tissue-packet holder and asked if he could buy it for his mum. She was so astonished to hear Ian speak, and so touched by the boy’s concern for a vanished mother, that she advanced him three pounds out of her float. She would charge it, she decided, to therapy.

  Once out of the ticket office the children galloped into the woods, ignoring the carefully marked walkways. Soon Miss O’Rourke was alone, not knowing which way to turn, peering into the shadows under the dark trees from which golden leaves were still falling, calling, as her Irish mother used to call for her, ‘Coo . . . eee . . . !’ but answer came there none. It amazed her that so many children could disappear so swifdy and leave such a heavy silence behind them.

  Ian had run as quickly as any of them, slithered down a precipice of wet leaves and stumbled over fallen branches. He felt the edge of a ploughed field sucking at his trainers until he reached the road. He hadn’t bought a tissue-holder but still held the three, warm pound coins in his clenched fist. He would be able to pay for a bus if he could find one on the road he had seen signposted to Coldsands-on-Sea.

  ‘I remembered where you live,’ Ian said. ‘I remember where Mum brought me. A long time ago.’

  ‘Not so long.’

  ‘Seems long to me.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it does to me too.’

  They were in Felix’s kitchen eating fish and chips which they had bought opposite the pier. Ian still had change left from his bus fare and had offered a contribution which Felix refused. As he bit into a flabby chip, only made interesting by salt and vinegar, Felix remembered, for some reason, fish and chips with Ann on the night he brought her home after the theatre, when they talked about the ambiguity of art, and she made love to him with astonishing determination.

  Ian said, ‘Mum’s not coming back.’

  ‘How could you think that? Of course she is!’

  ‘She wrote “I hope and pray it won’t be long”. But she took all her stuff. I don’t think she’ll be back.’

  Felix thought of the varying appearances of Mirry, who had burst into his life
and disappeared as suddenly because she had lied about a dead body. She might, indeed, stay away a long time.

  ‘For good and all,’ Ian said. ‘I think she’s gone for good.’

  ‘Well, then.’ Felix did his best to sound bright and encouraging. ‘Is it all right where you are?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not all right.’

  ‘Why not exactly?’

  ‘With Mum it was a bit uncertain. I mean, you didn’t quite know what was going to happen next. And she wasn’t all that good at keeping quiet. But in the children’s home ... I don’t know. There are just too many people.’

  ‘You don’t like them?’

  ‘Some of them are all right I suppose. But, well . . . We’re not free. I just feel as if I’ve been captured.’

  Unfortunately, Felix thought, I know what you mean.

  ‘I don’t want to stay there,’ Ian said and selected another chip.

  Then Felix didn’t know what to say so, remembering his last conversation with Ian, he asked, ‘Read any good books lately?’

  ‘The Dog’s Dinner.’

  ‘Who’s that by?’

  ‘Nora Bone!’

  Felix laughed; Ian looked solemn.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘The Haunted House.’

  ‘Who wrote that, then?’

  ‘Hugo First! You’re not sending me back there, are you?’

  ‘I suppose we’ll have to ring up and explain. We can do that in the morning.’

  ‘Explain what?’

  ‘Well, where you are. Who I am. Why you came here.’

  ‘I came here because I want you to look after me. That’s all.’

  ‘Me? Why do you think I’d look after you?’ Felix was sorry when he’d said it. Ian looked suddenly lost, as though his last hope had gone. So they stared at each other, serious and solemn: the lonely man who had lived through a life he’d never thought to encounter, and the lonely boy who reminded him of himself

  ‘Because you’re my dad. You are, aren’t you?’

  As though from a great distance away Felix heard himself saying, unaccountably, ‘Yes.’

  ‘This Miss O’Rourke’s been quite helpful. Ian’s going to come to me at weekends. Then he might be with me all the time. He could go to Coldsands High.’