Felix in the Underworld by John Mortimer

Felix felt a wild moment of relief, as at the climax of love. Unaccustomed to rage, he found the sensation intoxicating and heard his voice as though it were someone else calling in the distance, ‘You bastard! I’m going through all this just to get you off the hook? Is that what you’re saying? Let me tell you something. Prison’s too good for you! Get out of my life, do you hear me? You can drop dead, Gavin, for all I care. Drop bloody well dead!’
    Gavin, smiling, turned to join the crowd round the chained man and Felix heard a sharp command, ‘Sign this, will you, with some message of respect for an older wordsmith. Il miglior fabbro or some such brown-nosing inscription.’ Gavin’s place had been taken by that uncoordinated daddy-long-legs of an elderly author, Sir Ernest Thessaley, who had paused outside the bookshop on his way to the Sheridan Club and was interested enough to ask, ‘Was that the fellow you’re planning to kill?’ and, as he took the signed copy of Out of Season, ‘Have I contributed, in some small way, to the price put upon his head?’
    On his way home in the train Felix opened the brown envelope. In it he found further photographs of Ian, his latest school report, and a sprig of brown seaweed. Such a piece, he remembered, used to hang outside the back door of his parents’ house at Coldsands in order, by its occasional dampness, to foretell the state of the weather. As a bored child he would pinch and pop its dried pimples. This present of seaweed was attached to a card which showed the silhouettes of a pierrot and pierrette kissing in front of a yellow dinner-plate of a moon. On it Miriam had scrawled in green ink ‘A memento of our great occasion. I took it home from the breakwater.’
    Felix put everything back into the brown envelope and, being alone in the compartment, threw it out of the train window as they approached Guildford.

Chapter Nine
    In the crime stories Felix had read, in the films he had seen, the central character returns to find his house in total disorder, drawers pulled out, desk rifled and cupboards emptied, in the search for some clue or treasure he didn’t know he possessed. Feeling that an undeserved and fraudulent mystery had been dumped upon him, he was not surprised, some days later, to find that a window-pane next to the front door and giving on to a downstairs lavatory had been broken and the window was swinging open. By the seat a small table, carrying a pile of literary magazines and a useful work called The World’s Most Popular Plots, had been upset and an entrance clearly effected. After a thorough and prolonged search of his home he found nothing missing or apparently disturbed. What housebreaker would enter merely for the pleasure of looking at his ornaments, reading the half-covered sheet of paper on his desk, or taking in the view of the sea from his workroom window?
    A week later he gave himself a day off to go to London, having invited Ms Bodkin to lunch in the wine bar opposite Llama Books in the Fulham Road. As usual he looked forward eagerly to such an encounter but this time it went badly from the start. Brenda arrived twenty-five minutes late and apparently triumphant.
    â€˜I’ve been speaking to Lucasta,’ she told him. ‘She’s all set to do a piece in the Meteor. ’
    â€˜About my book?’
    â€˜About your baby!’
    â€˜No!’
    â€˜Of course she’ll give the book a passing mensh.’
    â€˜It’s not a baby. It’s ten. And it’s certainly not mine!’
    â€˜Oh, go on, Felix!’ Brenda was laughing happily. ‘You know how keen you are on doing it. You hardly talk about anything else.’
    â€˜Well, I didn’t do it with her. Not with the child’s mother. Not on a lilo on the beach.’
    â€˜Is that where it happened?’
    â€˜I don’t know who she is. That is to say, I hardly know who she