Felix in the Underworld

by John Mortimer

  The car park was at the back of Llama Books’ office block, a covered, concrete area guarded by Donald, a small Scotsman who used a curious crouching run to seek out and clamp any unauthorized shopper or careless author who parked in the spaces provided for the higher reaches of management and, of course, for the reps. Brenda, after a good deal of political manipulation, threats to leave and buttering up of Tubal-Smith, had got her slot and when she drove into it she stopped at the glass-walled booth from which Donald kept watch over his domain. She asked after Terry’s Vauxhall Astra and was told that it had been taken out a couple of weeks ago. It was the habit of the reps to sign the cars in and out and a book was available on a shelf in the booth.

  Brenda, who could charm Donald out of his usual mood of beady hostility, helped him find Terry’s scrawled name by a date well after Gavin’s murder. Donald hadn’t seen Terry go. He was, wasn’t he, entitled to a lunch break, during which the booth was open so that reps could get at the book.

  Donald seemed to remember that the car had been there for quite a while. He remembered Terry saying, at the end of one day, that he was going to a meeting of RPU (officially the Representatives of Publishers’ Union, but unofficially, and more accurately, the Reps Piss-up) in the old Jane Shaw pub round Ludgate Circus. Terry was determined to get drunk, anxious to avoid arrest and so had decided to leave his car in its parking space. Donald was a little surprised by the time it had stayed there, but assumed Terry was either drunk for a good many days or had been working in Central London.

  When she got into her office Brenda rang Tony to tell her that her husband had taken out his car and was no doubt with it somewhere, alive and well. She didn’t say, and it wasn’t yet time to say, that there was a strong possibility that Tony’s sexually uncertain husband had committed murder and was in flight from the police.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  ‘Any history of mental disease in your family?’

  ‘My father was a bank manager who took up golf. Oh, and my mother became interested in the novel late in life.’

  ‘You put that down to mental disease?’

  ‘I can think of no other explanation.’

  ‘Can think of no other explanation,’ the doctor repeated quietly as he made a note. ‘How’s your health otherwise? Waterworks?’

  ‘Does it?’ Felix looked confused. The doctor explained his question with weary patience. ‘I mean are you passing water easily?’

  ‘All too easily.’

  ‘Bowels moving regularly?’

  ‘I try to suppress them.’

  ‘Tries to suppress bowel movements. . .’ The doctor made another note. ‘Have you a rational explanation for that?’

  ‘I was sharing a cell with rather a large murderer. He didn’t want me to use the lavatory.’ The doctor looked searchingly at Felix, as though he had some fascinating but hitherto undiscovered complaint. This doctor had what Felix thought of, and would have described, as a silly hairdo. His dark wavy hair, in some attempt to recover lost youth, was brushed forwards and towards his eyes, so that he seemed to have a villainously low forehead. He had a square face and large, white hands. He wore, again in the search for youth, a floppy, unstructured suit made of some lightweight material. Felix was beginning to tire of his company. He said, ‘I’ve been enhanced since then. I’m now in a cell on my own but I’m still nervous about going to the lavatory.’

  ‘Still nervous of the toilet’ the doctor wrote down. ‘Other effects of prison life on your mental state, are there?’

  ‘I do think’ – the doctor had hit on a subject which interested Felix – ‘your surroundings influence your mind. My mind’s a chameleon. I live by that sad sea, the English Channel. A lot of wind and white paint flaking off boarding-houses. Rain on the pier. So I write about lonely people.’

  ‘I have to confess’ – the doctor seemed to take some pleasure in the confession – ‘that I haven’t read any of your books.’

  ‘Here on remand’ – Felix was explaining it to himself – ‘I seem to have absorbed the prison culture.’

  ‘You mean you’re learning how to steal cars?’

  ‘Not that exactly. I’ve come to enjoy Australian soap operas and the novels of Sandra Tantamount.’

  ‘I doubt if the court would accept that as evidence of an abnormality of mind arising from a condition of arrested or retarded development.’

  ‘Would they not? You surprise me.’

  ‘Let me explain.’ The doctor leant forward earnestly and Felix got a strong whiff of aftershave (Pour les Jeunes Hommes by Carcinette). ‘Murderers often obliterate the act from their mind. The brain, bit of a clever dick in many ways, tidies it away, pushes it under the sofa, so you genuinely forget you’ve ever killed anyone.’

  ‘I know I’ve never killed anyone.’

  ‘There, you see! The brain’s done a magnificent tidying-up job in your case. But the subconscious works overtime, as you well know. So it makes you see something that, well, just isn’t there.’

  ‘What isn’t there?’

  ‘Gavin Piercey.’

  ‘I saw him. After he was supposed to be dead.’

  ‘The man you killed?’

  ‘I didn’t kill him and I saw him three times.’

  ‘How comforting’ – the doctor leant back now, all smiles ‘for you to see the man you killed still alive and walking about London! How reassuring. That’s one thing you can say for the old subconscious. It always tells you what you want to know.’

  Felix looked at the doctor and said, ‘Who sent you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re not the prison doctor. Not in that suit. Did Roache send you?’

  There was silence. The doctor put his notes and fountain pen carefully away in a leather briefcase. Then he said, ‘Septimus and I go way back. We’ve worked together on hundreds of cases. We’ve got an excellent track record.’

  ‘And Roache wants you to say I’m insane?’

  ‘Oh not insane. Not the full monte, I wouldn’t say that. Diminished responsibility by reason of an abnormality of mind under Section 2 of the Homicide Act 1957. Septimus just wants to use that as a backstop in case provocation becomes unstuck.’

  ‘I wasn’t provoked and I’m not loopy.’ Felix rose to terminate the interview. ‘I just didn’t do it. I’m going to read all the evidence now and work out my own defence. I’m sorry but I don’t think I need you or Section 2 of the Homicide Act.’

  ‘You’re making a big mistake,’ the doctor told him. ‘Looking at you I can see that you’re clearly diminished.’

  Septimus Roache had sent Felix the big bundle of prosecution statements after their last conference. He’d put off reading them as he’d wanted to finish Pot Red (sex and shenanigans in world-class snooker) by Sandra Tantamount. He went back to his cell and read them now. With the documents came a slim volume of photographs in bright colour. Felix took off his glasses in order not to see too clearly the disfigured body slumped in the van or, stretched naked and defenceless, in the mortuary. But he looked carefully at the interiors of Gavin’s flat, presumably taken to establish the dead man’s identity. The bedroom was as he remembered it, the cupboard door open and, on its coat hanger, he could see the sleeve and shoulder of a blue suit.

  ‘All these events. One thing after another. Things happening. Well, to someone like me. Someone to whom things hardly happen at all. It seemed, well, totally unreal. Like a dream. Something I’d never dare put in a book because no one would believe it. But then I lay down on my bunk with that bundle of statements and I read them all through, like a novel, and I thought, well, that’s true. That must be it. That really happened. I suppose it’s because it was written down.’

  Brenda said, ‘So Gavin shopped Terry, the rep, to PROD.’ Felix and Brenda were in the visitors’ room. At the next table a big black man with grizzled hair was telling his blonde girl visitor, who looked very young, a joke to cheer her up. His shoulders were shaking with laughter whilst she
was in tears. Brenda said, ‘Don’t you see what that means?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘PROD were after Gavin for some money. He thought if he told them where they could find Terry, they’d be grateful. Perhaps give him a discount, time to pay or something. God knows how they work.’

  ‘One thing I noticed, reading through those things . . .’

  ‘So Terry went after Gavin to protest,’ Brenda carried on with her solution. ‘There was a quarrel. Terry hit Gavin with a spanner. Probably he didn’t mean to kill him at first but he got into a panic.’

  ‘. . . It was something about the clothes found on the dead body.’

  ‘Anyway, Terry killed him! Then he went into hiding. Just like he did before. Went missing. Didn’t tell his wife. She said he used to sleep in his car. They must find out what’s happened to the car.’

  ‘It said the dead man was wearing a blue suit.’

  ‘The police have only got to look for the car. Put out a message. All over the country. The car must be somewhere.’

  ‘And there was a blue suit in the cupboard. In Gavin’s flat.’

  ‘Will you tell them to search for Terry? Put out his description. You can tell your police inspector that. She’s a woman. You can probably get her to do what you want.’

  ‘You’re a woman and I can’t get you to do what I want.’

  ‘Oh, please! What do you expect me to do? Lie down under the table? I’d be arrested and you’d get about three years.’

  Felix dismissed the vision of Brenda under the table firmly from his mind and said, ‘Do you think Gavin had two blue suits? I imagine he only had one. One business suit.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Perhaps not. All the same I’d like to know the answer.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they said he died in a blue suit. But when I saw Gavin . .

  ‘After he was dead?’

  ‘That’s what they say! He wasn’t wearing a blue suit at all, although there was one in his cupboard. He was wearing a maroon anorak and grey baggy trousers. . .’

  ‘So he’d died in a blue suit, gone upstairs, changed into leisurewear for comfort and decided to go for a walk along the Thames Embankment?’

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘You’ve got to give up this story, Felix. There’s no future in Gavin’s mysterious resurrection.’

  ‘A future for Gavin, possibly.’

  ‘Just tell Ms Police Inspector. She’s got to find Terry. Promise me?’ She wrote down the number of the car and gave it to Felix.

  ‘All right, I promise. But Mirry would know how many blue suits Gavin had. And about the anorak.’

  ‘Mirry?’

  ‘Miriam Bowker. I should have asked her when I had the chance.’

  ‘The mother of your child?’

  ‘So she says. But I’m sure there’s a lot more she could tell us.’

  ‘All right. Where do I find her?’

  ‘Thank you, Brenda. Thank you very much,’ Felix said and told her about the flat at the World’s End.

  She wrote down the address in her Filofax. ‘Think nothing of it. Anything to keep your mind off sex.’

  ‘You’re saying you saw a miracle?’

  ‘I’m not saying that. Not exactly.’

  ‘Good! Very good! I don’t think we’ll be seeing miracles. Not nowadays.’

  ‘You mean God can’t do them?’

  ‘Can’t? Why do you say can’t? There’s nothing God can’t do. Miracles are just things he doesn’t care for any more. He’s given them up.’

  ‘I see. Like smoking?’

  ‘I know of nothing,’ the Reverend Lionel Doone, prison chaplain, told Felix, ‘either in the Scriptures or subsequent theology, to suggest that God was ever a smoker.’ He had come stooping into the cell, an exceptionally tall man with a puzzled expression. Now he loomed over Felix, who sat on his bunk enjoying, as he always had, discussions about the God he couldn’t bring himself to believe in. He said, ‘What about water into wine, the feeding of the five thousand, restoring sight to the blind? Wasn’t that all a bit miraculous? Anyway, how did you know that I thought I saw Gavin Piercey after his murder?’

  ‘Your lawyers gave me the brief history.’

  ‘The raising of Lazarus. Isn’t that a case in point? Anyway, my solicitors want me to be insane.’

  ‘They don’t want that. Their hope is that you’re a person of diminished responsibility.’

  ‘Do you think Lazarus was of diminished responsibility?’

  ‘Lazarus was a long time ago.’

  ‘Does that make any difference? Under the great arch of eternity?’

  The Reverend Lionel seemed a little shocked by Felix’s ecclesiastical manner of speech. He said, ‘There’s no doubt God could go on creating miracles. When our faith was young it needed, perhaps, a bang on the drum, a trumpet call to attract attention. Nowadays, I believe, he finds that sort of thing, well, how can I put it?’

  ‘Cheap publicity?’

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘Nowadays he prefers a programme without commercials

  ‘Let us say he doesn’t seek out faith by mere . . .’

  ‘Conjuring tricks?’

  ‘You put it very well.’ Far above Felix’s head the chaplain nodded. ‘Of course, that’s your business, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’re quite sure, are you, that God wouldn’t just try a small miracle if he happened to find a man dead in a van in Bayswater?’

  ‘I’m convinced that he would think such a thing hideously vulgar. What would be the point of it?’

  ‘Perhaps just to keep his hand in?’

  ‘No!’ The chaplain was without doubt on the subject. ‘His hand has never been out.’

  ‘So no more miracles?’

  ‘I’m sure he thinks that sort of thing quite out of date.’ Silence fell between the prisoner and the prison chaplain. Then Felix said, ‘I just wondered . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well. Exactly what clothes Lazarus was wearing. When he was raised from the dead.’

  ‘Oh, I can tell you that,’ said the chaplain. ‘He was wearing grave clothes. He’d been four days dead.’

  Chapter Twenty-three

  When he was ten years old Felix found the book he enjoyed most in the glass-fronted bookcase in his parents’ sitting-room, sharing the space with a couple of china shepherdesses, a Staffordshire spaniel and a mysterious piece of stone which his father always told him had fallen from a meteorite one stormy night over Coldsands, but which had, apart from a certain glint noticeable in some lights, a distinctly earthbound appearance. There were three neat rows of books and between The Life of Field Marshal Montgomery and The World’s Best Golfing Stories he found The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. As he lay on his bunk he thought about ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’. What was it all about? A man who unwound a handkerchief and showed a horrid red, spongy surface where the thumb should have been. How had he been so damaged? Something to do with fuller’s earth, whatever that might be. Felix had no idea. But what he remembered was the unfortunate engineer being shut in a cell-sized room, and seeing, after a slight hiss, that ‘the black ceiling was coming down upon me, slowly, jerkily, but, as no one knew better than myself, with a force which must within a minute grind me to a shapeless pulp’. As he looked upwards Felix imagined the sound of distant levers and the ceiling falling to crush him. The fears which had forced his fingernails into the palms of his hands on the first day of his imprisonment came creeping back.

  That day seemed decades ago, years, he thought. Great stretches of helpless, tedious and useless time extended the gap. He was doing time and it demanded his full attention.

  There had only been one diversion since Brenda’s visit. He had asked to make a further statement to the police and, when he was taken to the interview room, he told Detective Sergeant Wathen, who had arrived with his Detective Constable, all that Brenda had discovered about Terry, the rep, and the number of his ca
r. Wathen promised to bring the matter to the attention of his Detective Chief Inspector but clearly thought little of Brenda’s ideas or her suggested line of inquiry. ‘I very much doubt,’ he said, ‘if I shall be able to persuade Her Majesty to spend more police time and money on further inquiries. We’re satisfied we’ve got the right answer on this one.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Felix asked. ‘And what’s the answer then?’

  ‘You.’

  Felix was taken back to his cell, where, after more seemingly endless days had passed, he took to lying on his bunk and thinking about ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’.

  The bundle of prosecution statements lay on his table. He no longer read them. He no longer read anything. Even his last Sandra Tantamount was unfinished. He had been excited by something he remembered at the time of Brenda’s last visit apart from the colour of her hair, her thin wrists and pale fingers, the slight pucker of her lips as she examined his case with a shrewdness apparently beyond the reach of Septimus Roache or Chipless, QC. What was the thought which had struck him and seemed so important at the time? He tried to recapture it but it was sucked down into the swamp of lethargy into which he was slowly sinking.

  For the thousandth time he gazed round his cell and, for the thousandth time, he found nothing much to look at. There was one change, however. Over the wash-basin and the in-cell lavatory a photograph of a solemn child, wearing spectacles and a school blazer, was Blu-tacked to the wall.

  When the cell doors opened, the screw told Felix he had a visitor. For a moment he wondered if it was Brenda back, or was he being taken out for trial? Such hopes faded when he faced the lofty clergyman who had come to lend him a book called Faith without Miracles.

  ‘After all,’ his visitor told him, ‘we don’t need to see a woman sawn in half to know that the conjuror exists.’ Then he noticed the photograph on the wall and went to examine it with approval. ‘I’m glad to see you’re a family man,’ he said.