Felix in the Underworld

by John Mortimer

  ‘Well, I suppose there was you . . .’

  ‘Only Jim Clothard. The software king. One of the world’s great communicators.’

  ‘You mean someone like Dickens or Shakespeare? Or Tolstoy perhaps?’

  She saw, with some satisfaction, that she had now gone too far. Tubal-Smith levered himself off the sofa and started to pace the office in his stockinged feet. ‘Brenda,’ he said, ‘I don’t know if it’s slipped the attention of the publicity department but one of our authors has just been arrested on suspicion of murder.’

  ‘It’ll mean a fantastic interest in his book! It really started to move after Lucasta’s article. Now it’s bound to make the bestsellers’.’

  ‘Not’ – he turned on her triumphantly – ‘if we don’t get it into the shops! I called into the Fulham Road Millstream’s on the way in and there wasn’t a single Morsom on the shelves. Moreover, I want you to know, they told me they hadn’t seen our rep for weeks.’

  ‘That’s not strictly my business.’

  ‘Then make it your business, Brenda.’ Tubal-Smith’s voice sank to a low whisper which used to terrify the board at Noah’s Ark Pet Foods. ‘No good getting all this stuff into the papers if we can’t get the books in the shops.’

  ‘We’ve had a rep off recently. I believe he’s sick.’

  ‘Don’t believe anything, Brenda. Find out! We’ve got no immediate plans for slimming down the publicity department. Yet.’

  To this rather feeble threat, Brenda played her trump card. ‘Let me know when you’ve decided,’ she told him. ‘I’ve been offered considerably more money by Four Corners, so feel free.’

  Tubal-Smith looked a little like the Thane of Cawdor who, about to sit down to a dinner party, notices that his place has been taken by Banquo’s ghost. He had read on the aeroplane the rumours that Catesby’s was considering selling Llama Books off to Four Corners, which would end in his being personally slimmed down. Brenda passed him on her way to the door and he smelled the faint odour of fruit not yet ripe.

  ‘And don’t worry about Felix either,’ she said. ‘He didn’t do it.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He never does. Not doing things is his speciality.’

  ‘I wonder,’ he said, trying to sound friendly, ‘if the plane had crashed, would the headline have been well-known PUBLISHER IN AEROPLANE DISASTER Or QUEEN OF FASHION KILLED?’

  ‘I should think that would have been absolutely no contest.’

  ‘Thank you, Brenda.’ Tubal-Smith was sure he’d been paid a compliment. ‘Thank you very much. You know I’m having dinner with the Gantries? He’s just running up the new Oxford lottery college. Just wait till I tell them I know the star of the newest murder.’

  Felix Morsom, Brenda realized, had become a name to be dropped.

  She had in her mind the indelible and disturbing picture of one of her favourite authors, Booker nominee and occasional bestseller, sitting in the shadows outside Anna Darling, lifting a beseeching hand for small change. She had told nobody, not Tubal-Smith, not even Paul, and certainly not the police, about what she saw. She couldn’t guess how he had come there but she felt guilty. Perhaps, if she had been more accommodating, he might not have had to go to such horrifying lengths in search of excitement. Although she had, she now remembered with regret, urged him to add more colour to his life, she had never meant to drive him to the lurid role of a suspected murderer begging in the street. She resolved to help Felix although she had not the remotest idea how to start.

  Brenda sat in her office, a glass-walled pen in the comer of the publicity department, where girls were sticking review copies into Jiffy bags and phoning nervous authors to ask if they were prepared to ‘do the Denny Densher’.

  And, as she thought about Felix, Brenda Bodkin was surprised to discover how much she missed him. There was no one else to whom she could give pleasure so easily. Pleasing Paul entailed close attention, flattery and considerable effort. But she could bring sudden happiness to Felix, she knew, simply by ringing up, or holding his hand in the car, or smiling at him in public as though there were secrets between them. She felt that he was kind, considerate and thought of her when she wasn’t there. She wanted to comfort him, to cheer him up, to put her arms round him unexpectedly.

  Then she looked in her book for the number on which she always called Terry, the rep, and found him in his car, or in a bookshop, or some bar where he was enjoying a short rest, a pint of Murphy’s stout and a packet of bacon-and-egg-flavoured crisps. What she got was a bright female voice repeating, ‘The cellphone you are calling has been disconnected.’

  There was another number in her book, written in some years before. The pencil had faded and she remembered that Terry had asked her not to use it. When she rang she got a woman whom she seemed to have interrupted in the middle of a nervous breakdown. She said she hadn’t seen Terry for a month and had no idea where he’d got to. He was meant to take the kids out at the end of last week and didn’t show up. If that was his job speaking they might like to know that the Parental Obligations were after Terry again for back maintenance. Ten thousand pounds. And what did his job intend to do about it? Then a child could be heard screaming and the woman shouted, ‘Shut up, you little sod!’ Brenda replaced the telephone gently, unwilling to intrude on private grief.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Banged up in the police cell Felix, clenching his fist and digging his nails into his palms, sat on a bench as far as possible from the entrance, determined not to move. He knew that if he did so he would throw himself at the door in the ridiculous hope that it would open and, when it didn’t, scream in panic. In his childhood, taking his father’s advice and making use of the facilities in the Princess Beatrice Hotel, Coldsands-on-Sea, he had managed to lock himself in the Gents and sentenced himself to just under half an hour’s imprisonment. When his screams at last alerted a dozing attendant and a carpenter was sent for, the hall porter, a bulbous man with a slight cast in one eye, said to the nine-year-old boy, ‘Let that be a lesson to you, sonny. Never lock a lavatory door again as long as you live.’

  It was advice Felix had always remembered. Wherever possible he avoided lifts, held his breath in revolving doors, and the lavatories he occupied always had Vacant written on them. He had once, long ago, seen a play in Coldsands Rep in which a young man, falsely imprisoned, concluded Act One by feeling slowly and methodically round the walls of his cell. He didn’t do that, nor did he pace out his prison’s measurements as Dantes did in the Chateau d’If. He sat very still, closed his eyes, and pretended he was sitting on a beach near Coldsands pier, or staring from his window at the grey, uneventful sea. This worked so well that the pretence seemed reality and when the cell door was unlocked to admit a visitor, he felt that he had slipped back into a bad dream. A whiff of eau de cologne covering stale cigar smoke and the tang of an unchanged shirt announced the arrival of Septimus Roache, legal adviser to authors in distress.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ The sleepy, half-awake Felix had the instant and understandable impression that the lawyer himself was in trouble.

  ‘Because you had the good sense and decency to send for me. You couldn’t have done better.’

  ‘I sent for you?’

  ‘They asked you if you wanted a solicitor. They’ve got to do that. So naturally you mentioned my name. Well, you owed me a favour. I did rather resent being woken up in the small hours to be told you were having breakfast at the Savoy.’

  ‘You’re going to defend me?’

  ‘I told you I would.’ Septimus smiled, exposing a row of nicotine-stained teeth, and Felix felt a growing sensation of unease. ‘If you got yourself into a decent sort of scrape, something with a bit more meat to it than a boring little bastardy, we’d roll out the red carpet for you. I’ll get you a sparky young QC. Chipless Warrington’s had quite a run of luck in murder lately.’ A shadow of a doubt fell over the contented solicitor. ‘You do earn more than ten thousand a year, I hope?’r />
  ‘Quite a bit more.’

  ‘And you’ve got a house? Unencumbered?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘Thank God’ – Septimus closed his eyes as though in prayer ‘you don’t qualify for legal aid! Legal aid’s out of bounds as far as I’m concerned. My partners won’t allow me to touch

  it. All right then? Stage one. The police are going to ask you questions.’

  ‘I’ll do my best to answer them.’

  ‘Oh, my God!’ Septimus rolled his eyes towards heaven. ‘You authors are all the same. Clean characters! Never been in trouble before, I suppose?’

  ‘Only parking fines.’

  ‘Parking fines!’ Septimus seemed to be about to spit. ‘So one has to start by teaching you the alphabet. You have to learn from the very beginning. You will not do your best to answer them. You will answer nothing. You will listen to me saying, “We are not prepared to answer that question until we have been formally charged and have had an opportunity to make further inquiries. For the moment we reserve our defence.” We’re not going to load Chipless, QC with a lot of incriminating answers he’ll have to say were beaten out of you. As the officer in charge of the case looks like the winner of a gorgeous granny contest, that might cause even Chipless a little difficulty.’

  ‘But I want to tell them . . .’ Although the whole conversation seemed unreal, and he still felt half asleep, Felix knew he had something of great importance to communicate. ‘I want to tell them that Gavin Piercey’s still alive.’

  ‘Not that rubbish you talked when you rang me up in the middle of the night? Not that old resurrection defence story?’

  ‘I’m sure I saw him. Three times.’

  ‘Like I said. On the road to Emmaus.’

  ‘The first was Victoria Station ‘What’d you been drinking?’

  ‘Quite a bit of beer, half a bottle of sake and a double brandy.’

  ‘Add a few rum and cokes if anyone else asks you to explain these hallucinations, which let’s hope they won’t.’

  ‘But I told them. I told the Furies.’

  ‘Who did you say?’

  ‘The Furies.’

  ‘That was what I thought you said. The Furies. The Eumenides. The ones we fear to name. For God’s sake! I know you authors. You live in a world of myth and make-believe.’

  ‘My Furies are two police officers. One tall and bald, the other short and casually dressed. I told them when they arrested me.’

  ‘Do I have to be with you every minute, night and day, holding your hand?’ Septimus stood, his legs apart, his thumbs stuck in the pockets of his waistcoat, and looked sadly at his client. ‘What did you want to tell them a thing like that for?’

  ‘Because it’s true.’

  ‘That’s no sort of excuse for opening your mouth about anything. Not if you’re a defendant. Well, there’s two ways we can go on this one. We can agree you said it and plead insanity. I know a couple of friendly quacks who’d be kind enough to find, at the very least, diminished responsibility. The trouble is, do you want to spend the rest of your life in a funny farm for mad assassins, awaiting Her Majesty’s Pleasure, or do you not?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Then you were still a bit pissed, old boy. And thought you’d seen a ghost.’

  ‘A ghost?’ Spirits, dreams, phantoms? Septimus had twice mentioned the road to Emmaus and Felix thought of the improbability of Gavin as a Christlike figure, magically immortal. He hadn’t seen him call for boiled fish and honeycomb; he hadn’t known him by the breaking of the bread. He had only thought he’d seen him warming his hands on a cup but that was at night, from a distance, when Felix was tired and full of sake. He had been haunted by Gavin for a long time. Was he still haunted? His belief began to drain away as, at an earlier age, had his acceptance of miracles and his faith in God. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘I might have imagined it.’

  ‘That’s good!’ Septimus smiled in an encouraging fashion. ‘We’re coming along nicely.’

  ‘But if Gavin isn’t alive’ – Felix knew he ought to be worried about something – ‘what’s my defence going to be?’

  ‘Don’t worry your head.’ Septimus was looking so cheerfully avuncular that he might almost have said ‘pretty little head’. ‘We’ll deal with that in conference with Chipless. After all it’s his business to provide defences. Now I expect the gorgeous granny will be about ready for us. That is, if someone’s shown her how to work the tape-recorder!’

  ‘I have just returned from a visit to my landlord, the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.’ The recording machine, its little red light glowing, spoke these words in Detective Chief Inspector Cowling’s soft and educated voice. The Detective Inspector herself was wearing a beige suit, tan shoes, a cream shirt discreetly open at the neck to display only a few of her row of pearls, and her hair looked as though she had a quick shampoo and set every morning on her way in. She said, ‘I expect you know where that comes from?’

  ‘Of course!’ Felix felt that this, at least, was a question he’d be allowed to answer. ‘It’s the opening sentence of Wuthering Heights.’

  ‘What a relief!’ – the Detective Inspector’s teeth shone to match her necklace – ‘to find someone literate at work. And that doesn’t only go for the villains.’ Detective Constable Newbury, seated with his notebook at a small table in a comer of the interview room, looked pained. ‘I shouldn’t have said that about DC Newbury,’ the Detective Inspector hastened to add. ‘He’s a tremendous admirer of Watership Down.’

  ‘They’re all rabbits,’ Leonard Newbury told them. ‘You wouldn’t believe it!’

  ‘I put that test sentence in the machine especially for you.’ The Detective Inspector’s smile was almost flirtatious. ‘So much more interesting than ‘one, two, three, testing’. When I hoped we’d meet again, I didn’t imagine it’d be exactly in these circumstances. I’d wanted to ask you about something they told us in our creative writing course.’

  ‘What was that?’ It was Septimus Roache who asked the question sharply, suspecting bias.

  ‘Only the post-modernist view that the creator is of no interest in a study of the text. I mean, when it comes to an alleged crime, we can’t help being interested in its creator can we?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ Felix had to admit.

  ‘Oh, by the way, I’ve finished Molehill.’

  ‘You’ve finished what?’

  ‘Remember we were talking about my novel Here on This Molehill? I’ve submitted it to Llama Books. Thanks for the recommendation.’ And before Septimus could refuse to take the conversation further she pressed the button on the tape-recorder, restored the red light and said, loud and clear, ‘Interview with Felix Morsom, conducted by DCI Cowling in the presence of his solicitor and DC Newbury. 11.05 hours on Friday, 13th September. Mr Morsom, you are a highly respected writer of contemporary fiction, earning a comfortable living, are you not?’

  Felix was about to agree with becoming modesty when Septimus came growling in with ‘We are not prepared to answer that question until we have been formally charged and we have had an opportunity to make further inquiries.’ And that was the answer to every question during the next three quarters of an hour, during which Detective Chief Inspector Cowling remained smilingly polite and Detective Constable Newbury fell into a light doze.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Brenda walked down the long straight road between parked cars towards the main gate. She was not alone. Asian and Caribbean children, lanky blonde English girlfriends with Princess Di hairdos and little jewels in their noses, panting black mothers, their voices high with complaint, ageless women in saris, gliding along under the shadow of the wall, here an imam and there a rabbi – these were with her on the walk to the visitors’ entrance. Brenda Bodkin hadn’t had occasion to visit such a place before.

  That morning, as she sat in her office, a person with soft brown eyes and a small moustache, who had a reputation as a Don Giovanni in the accounts
department, had brought her a list of so-called expenses. Terry Whitlock, the rep, wanted them sent to an address in Chandos Street. He’d asked if they could be justified as the signature on the letter didn’t bear much relation to Terry’s. Brenda made a note of the address but had no further time to deal with the matter. She was on her way to prison.

  Once inside the visitors’ section, she was searched and had a metal detector passed over her body. Then she was allowed into a long room, one end of which had been fitted out like a day nursery, with a slide and a climbing frame, tables with sheets of paper, coloured chalks, picture books and jigsaws, where the children of the convicted, or those on remand, could entertain themselves, twittering like birds in an aviary, whilst their parents exchanged news, had suppressed quarrels or just sat having long since run out of sympathy, encouragement or regret.

  Brenda had been given a number and found her way to a similarly numbered table, a process which reminded her of a hundred literary lunches. Felix was brought towards her by a fat, ginger-haired officer whose great bunch of keys jangled as he walked. ‘Remember,’ this screw said, ‘visiting regulations. Quarter an hour minimum, three quarters maximum. Visit stops if you get abusive.’ She was left alone with her author.

  ‘It’s good of you to come.’

  ‘You asked me. I got a letter.’

  ‘I know. You didn’t mind?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I couldn’t really think of anyone else.’

  ‘Well, thank you, Felix, thank you very much.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. Thank you for coming anyway.’

  At the next table a very young couple, pale with stringy hair, wearing identical T-shirts and jeans, were holding both hands across the table, saying nothing. Brenda felt that she too had run out of conversation and there were still fourteen and a half minutes, minimum, to go.

  ‘I’ve been out with Sandra Tantamount,’ she told him.