Felix in the Underworld (19 page)

‘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.

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.

‘Was that good fun?

‘Marvellous! In Edinburgh she tried to get the manager sacked because there were no white lilies in her bedroom. In Dublin she wanted me to shoot vitamins into her bum with a hypodermic syringe before she'd go on the Gay Bums show. In Manchester she threw a pair of shoes at me and said, “Get these mended, girl!” And in Cardiff she wanted me to organize a male voice choir to carry her on their shoulders to a signing session. It wasn't good fun, exactly.'

Felix, who hadn't had many compliments lately, fished for one now. ‘Was it more fun with me?'

‘Yes, Felix.' She was being patient with him. ‘It was more fun with you.'

‘Not half as much fun as it'll be when we go abroad.'

‘If I were you I shouldn't think about that.' She was being deadly sensible.

‘Why not?'

‘I suppose because you're not going to be in a position to travel. Not for some time.'

‘Do you think I did it?' For the first time Felix sounded depressed.

‘No, I'm sure you didn't.'

‘I wish
I
was.'

‘What on earth do you mean?'

‘After all that's happened, I'm not really sure about anything.'

‘Who's defending you?' She came down to practical matters. ‘A pretty ghastly solicitor called Septimus Roache who has hair growing everywhere and smells peculiar and a rather unbearable young QC called Chipless Warrington.'

There was a silence while Brenda absorbed this information. Then she said, ‘Why Chipless?'

‘Because his father was a rubbish collector in Bermondsey and he went to a South London Comprehensive but he's got no sort of a chip on his shoulder. He's very democratic and behaves just as though he went to Eton.'

There was a long pause and she said, ‘Cleansing operative.'

‘What?'

‘That's what they call rubbish collectors nowadays. Have you got faith in him?'

‘Who?'

‘This Chipless?'

‘Not at all. It's difficult to have faith in anything much in here. Only the Moslems seem to manage it. Perhaps I should ask to see the Imam. Oh, there was a time when I began to believe in miracles.'

‘When was that?'

‘When I thought I saw Gavin rise from the dead. I saw him three times, you know.'

‘Felix' – Brenda was now at her most severe – ‘I'm not going to bother with you if you're going dotty on me.'

‘I thought you'd probably say that.'

‘I've got quite enough of all that with Sandra Tantamount.'

‘I suppose it could have been a mirage. Not that they have many mirages on the Thames Embankment.'

‘You've got to pull yourself together and get out of this mess. Someone's got to help you, even if this barrister of yours is several chips short of a take-away.'

‘Who?'

‘What?'

‘Who's going to help me?'

‘Well, I will. Within reason,' she promised him unexpectedly.

He asked her for a favour to start with. ‘I'm wearing these clothes because there's no one to bring in my other stuff, or to see it gets cleaned occasionally.'

For the first time she noticed that he was in a blue striped shirt and a pair of trousers that looked as though they had been cut from a grey army blanket. She then agreed to go to Coldsands, find his cleaning lady and bring up clothes to London, including a best suit for his day in court. He looked at her with as much gratitude as she might have deserved if she'd organized his instant acquittal.

‘Whatever you say' – he told her – ‘I shall think about our going abroad together. In the end.'

‘I suppose there's no harm in thinking about it. If you need to.'

‘I can't help it. Oh, if you come again . . .'

‘I shall come again,' she promised. ‘I'm not leaving you to Chipless.'

‘. . . Chekhov's
The Complete Plays.
On the shelf over my desk.'

‘I'll bring it,' she said, ‘together with the y-fronts.'

‘No.'

‘What?'

‘Boxer shorts. It's true. You never found out.'

‘Quarter of an hour,' the screw with the jangling keys came up and told them. ‘Do you want another fifteen?'

‘No,' Brenda said firmly, ‘that's quite enough to be going on with.'

The proceedings at the Magistrates' Court had been extremely brief. Septimus sent down a clerk and Chipless's junior. This was a young barrister called Quentin Thurgood who had been to Eton and was decidedly chippy about it, forever fearing that the best briefs in the really highly paid cases went to ruthless women barristers of Ugandan descent or to the products of North Country comprehensives. He would carry on for hours about snobbery at the Bar and deep-rooted prejudices against white, upper-class males, but he had very little to say on the subject of bail. ‘I'll ask for bail if you like,' he told Felix in the cells, ‘but it'll be bloody useless.' He did and it was. Felix was remanded in custody. For the short trip from the court to the bus, a security man was good enough to lend Felix a blanket to put over his head. Recent events had promoted him to the status of famous author, liable to be photographed at any and every opportunity.

Getting into prison was an endless process of form-filling by large men with very white shirts and jangling keys. Felix was taken behind a screen, stripped naked, showered, pushed and prodded in various ways, and examined by an exhausted young doctor who seemed to have emerged from medical school with his confidence shattered. Through most of this process Felix did as though he was at the dentist or having his hair cut; he kept his eyes shut and tried to recite to himself the poem
Ulysses
by Alfred Lord Tennyson which he had leand at school. He had just reached

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever . . .

when a voice shouted in his ear, ‘You got anyone near and dear to bring you in clean clothes and keep them washed and tidy?'

‘What? Oh well, not really.'

‘Right then.' And the voice called to another distant screw, ‘Prison clothing!'

So Felix had put on the regulation underclothes, then the shirt and the trousers which were so stiff and scratchy that they might have been left to stand up by themselves. When his few possessions had been locked up and signed for (only to emerge at the time of his release), when his money (one pound twenty-four p) had been carefully counted in his presence and removed, he was led through endless doors which had to be ceremoniously unlocked, past a yard where a few prisoners were playing basketball and into a building of high balconies with iron railings and nets stretched between them to catch those prone to suicide. He was surprised by the sullen quietness of the place, broken only by the click of balls on the ground-floor ping-pong and snooker tables, the murmur of voices on the prisoners' telephones and the eternal clanking of keys when the warders – a few of whom were women with elaborate hairdos – made the slightest movement. The yellow paint on the stone walls was an attempt at cheerfulness, like the laughter of lawyers in the corridors of the Magistrates' Court.

‘You share a cell here till we can assess your conduct,' the thin screw with glasses told him. ‘If you keep your nose clean, you may get enhanced to A block.'

Most of the prisoners were out of their cells and the door of Felix's future home was open. The cell seemed to be filled with two huge objects: a lavatory with a seat and cistern to replace the old-style chamber-pot, and a man lying in the shadows of the top bunk who was doing absolutely nothing. The screw departed and Felix, edging his way into the cell, sat down on a small chair at a smaller table near the door. A Scottish voice spoke from above his head saying, ‘So, you've turned up again.'

He had only heard the man speak rarely but peering upwards he recognized Dumbarton. ‘I thought from the way you carried on in the street you'd soon be in trouble.' The tall young Scotsman was far more loquacious in prison than he was under the arches of Shell Mex House.

‘Dumbarton! What're
you
here for?' Felix didn't know whether to count himself lucky in his cell mate.

There was a long silence, then Dumbarton said, ‘They got Esmond.'

‘You mean the police got him?'

‘No. Party-goers got him. Pubbers got him. Evening-outs got him. They kicked his head in. He's dead.'

Gentle Esmond, who posted his keys back through his front door and rejected the world, dead? Who else? Who now? Felix said, ‘He was kind to me. I'm sorry.'

‘Ah. But I paid them back for it.'

‘Did you?'

‘I killed one.'

‘One of them that did it?'

‘I couldn't tell that. All I know is he was a pubber. And he had drink taken. And he was coming down the steps where Esmond was done. So I knocked him down and kicked his head in for Esmond's sake.'

‘You killed him?'

‘Thoroughly.'

‘But he might not have been one of them that did for Esmond.'

‘Maybe not. But that was no concern of mine. Or of Esmond's either.'

There was another long silence and then Dumbarton said, ‘What did you do?'

‘I'm on remand. Accused of a murder I didn't do.'

‘Like all the rest of them in here!' Dumbarton spoke with undisguised contempt. ‘I'm the only one in here for a murder I did do. You'll not use that toilet in here. Not ever!' He'd been talking in a quiet, deliberately controlled Glasgow accent and his final command was yelled out like a parade ground order.

‘Why? Doesn't it work?' Felix found the courage to ask.

‘Of course it works! It'll take the place over if you let it. We've not got a cell with a toilet in it. We've got a toilet with a few inches of cell round it. I've got to eat my dinner in here. I've got to think my thoughts. If you want to go, you go when you're out of the cell. Just remember that!'