by M S Morris
‘Her book wasn’t sanctioned by the School?’ asked Bridget.
‘Certainly not, and I fear that it will drag our good name through the mud.’
Bridget was beginning to wish now that she had read Diane’s book after all. It would be helpful to have a few pertinent facts at her disposal. She cast her mind back to the talk at the Divinity School, but she had been too busy concentrating on security concerns – and, admittedly, some personal matters – to pay much attention to what Diane had said.
‘What exactly is it about the book that you object to, Professor?’ she asked politely.
A shadow passed across his face. ‘Dr Gilbert approached her work with a very particular mindset. She firmly believed that the Americans and the British were wrong to involve themselves in the affairs of the Middle East. She accused them of acting out of cynical self-interest and greed for oil.’ He paused briefly before continuing with a rising passion. ‘But she did not grow up in Kuwait, like I did. She did not see her own father gunned down and murdered by Saddam Hussein’s rampaging troops when they invaded my country in 1990. She did not see her mother weep and her sisters cower in fear. She did not feel for the region here, like I do.’ He thumped his hand against his chest, covering his heart with his fist.
Bridget waited for Professor Al-Mutairi to calm down after his emotional outburst. It was clear that Diane Gilbert wasn’t the only member of the Blavatnik School who had trouble viewing the world impartially.
‘Forgive me,’ he said at last. ‘You must understand that this is a matter of profound personal significance to me. The Americans and the British came to the rescue of my country, liberating it from its invaders, and putting it under their protection. According to people like Dr Gilbert, they were warmongers and colonialists. She could not have been further from the truth.’
‘You didn’t like her.’ Bridget made it a challenge, not a question.
Professor Al-Mutairi laid his palms flat on the desktop. When he spoke again, it was with his emotions carefully in check. ‘Inspector, far be it for me to speak ill of the dead, but Dr Gilbert was a difficult and opinionated woman who went out of her way to court controversy, indifferent to the effect that might have on her colleagues.’
‘Are you glad that she’s dead?’ asked Jake.
Al-Mutairi turned the full power of his gaze upon the young sergeant. ‘Dr Gilbert was a respected member of this School, and naturally I regret her passing. But I will shed no tears at her graveside.’
7
When Bridget returned to Kidlington, she found Ffion engrossed in A Deadly Race. She had already devoured a hundred pages of the book and was going strong. Bridget toyed with the idea of asking for a quick summary, but decided to leave Ffion to her task.
She sent Jake off to get on with the task of entering the details of their conversation with Professor Al-Mutairi into the HOLMES database while she looked up the website of Grant Sadler, Diane Gilbert’s literary agent. She had no idea how long Diane’s writing and publishing contacts would be staying in Oxford during the literary festival, and she wanted to catch up with as many as possible before they left town. She hoped that in the case of Grant Sadler, she wasn’t already too late.
She found his number on his website which announced that he was “currently open for submissions”. Scanning through the list of authors he claimed to represent, Bridget didn’t recognise a single name, save for that of Diane Gilbert, who was given pride of place on his homepage, and she wouldn’t have known that one two days ago. She wondered how well business was going for the agent.
Grant picked up on the third ring. ‘Hello? Who is this?’ He sounded on his guard, and Bridget divined that he had already heard about his number-one client’s untimely death. No doubt Jennifer Eagleston had informed him of the news.
‘Grant Sadler? It’s Detective Inspector Bridget Hart from Thames Valley Police. I was wondering if we could meet for a chat?’
‘To talk about Diane? Jennifer phoned me first thing this morning to tell me what happened. My God, I can’t believe it.’
‘Are you still in Oxford?’ As the agent had been in no hurry to get away the previous evening, Bridget assumed that he had stayed in the city overnight. ‘Where are you? I’m happy to come to you.’ She doubted that inviting him over to police headquarters in Kidlington would help to put him at his ease.
Grant hesitated before replying. ‘I’m staying at the Travelodge on the Abingdon Road,’ he said at last. He didn’t sound particularly happy about it. ‘There isn’t really anywhere here we can talk.’
Bridget pictured the budget hotel next to the Redbridge Park & Ride in the south of the city and wasn’t surprised that Grant felt uncomfortable admitting that he was staying there. She had pictured the world of book publishing as altogether more glamorous and imagined him installed in a suite at the Randolph Hotel, but she was clearly being naïve. Maybe high-profile events like the Oxford Literary Festival gave a false impression of the amount of money to be made from books. Writers who went from living on welfare to being worth hundreds of millions were clearly the exception rather than the rule. She began to feel a little sorry for the apparently hard-up agent.
‘Why don’t we meet in town?’ she suggested. ‘Do you know the Queen’s Lane Coffee House? It’s on the High Street opposite University College.’
Bridget hadn’t had anything to eat since leaving home that morning, which seemed like eons ago. The Queen’s Lane Coffee House was one of her favourite lunchtime haunts, and was said to be England’s oldest coffee house – although to be fair, the same claim was also made by the Grand Café on the opposite side of the High. Whatever the truth of the matter, food at the establishment was plentiful and not over-priced. Perfect if the agent was on a tight budget.
‘I know it,’ said Grant. ‘I’ll catch a bus and meet you there in half an hour.’
*
The Queen’s Lane Coffee House was packed with hungry clientele when Bridget arrived, rather out of breath after hurrying all the way from St Giles’ where she had left her car. She checked her watch and saw that she was late. When suggesting the coffee house as a meeting venue, she had forgotten to factor in Oxford’s dreadful traffic and lack of parking spaces in the town centre. With hindsight – or perhaps a little more foresight – one of the pubs on St Giles’ would have been a smarter choice.
Her route had taken her along Broad Street and past the Sheldonian Theatre and the marquee of the Oxford Literary Festival. Judging from the huge number of people queuing to enter the grand seventeenth-century building, a big-name author must be appearing. She remembered then that it was the historical novelist she had hoped to see herself. It was just as well she’d been unable to buy a ticket, as the murder case would have quashed any chance of her going along.
On entering the coffee house, Bridget discovered that despite being late there was no sign of Grant Sadler. Damn it. Had he already been and gone, or had he not turned up at all? She had just removed her phone from her bag and was redialling his number when his familiar face appeared at the door.
If on the previous evening the literary agent had been attempting to cultivate an edgy, cool image, this morning he looked simply haggard. His hair stood up on end, he hadn’t shaved, and his eyes were smudged as if he hadn’t slept a wink all night. Perhaps the phone call from Jennifer Eagleston had woken him rather earlier than he was used to.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘The bus took ages. I keep forgetting how awful the traffic is in Oxford.’
Bridget smiled, taking pity on him. It seemed that she and Grant shared an aversion for Oxford’s road congestion and traffic restrictions. Perhaps they would get on well together. ‘There’s one last table over in the corner,’ she said, pointing.
They grabbed it just before it was claimed by a couple of Japanese tourists who were clearly uncertain whether they were supposed to sit down first or order food at the counter. Bridget felt slightly guilty when she saw them turn and leave the sh
op, but then her stomach rumbled, quickly dispelling any lingering sense of remorse.
‘Lunch?’ she enquired cheerfully.
‘Yeah, I guess,’ said Grant. He took a seat opposite hers, his right knee bouncing up and down beneath the table. If anything, he appeared even more nervous than he had done the previous evening.
Bridget quickly perused the menu and when a young waitress came over to their table, she placed her usual order: Queen’s Chicken Royal – a fillet of chicken in ciabatta served with chips – and a bottle of mineral water. It was at least fifty per cent healthy by her reckoning.
‘Just a coffee for me,’ said Grant.
The waitress vanished into the kitchen, and Grant turned to stare out of the window. He watched as passers-by hurried along the pavement, but didn’t seem to see them. Bridget realised that he was in a deep state of shock. Eventually he seemed to recall that she was with him.
‘This might seem a silly question,’ she asked, ‘but what exactly does a literary agent do?’
‘Oh, right.’ The question had the desired effect, bringing him back from his faraway thoughts to focus on the present. ‘I suppose it isn’t necessarily obvious to people outside the industry. Agents act as the grease in the machine, making the whole publishing industry work. Or, if you don’t like the grease metaphor, you could think of us as glue, bringing authors and publishers together.’
‘So did you work on behalf of Diane?’
‘She was my client, yes. I negotiated to sell her manuscript to publishers.’
‘And she paid you for your services?’
He shook his head. ‘Her publisher paid me a percentage of her advance.’
‘Her advance?’
‘Sorry. Advance payment. It’s an amount that the publisher agrees to pay the author in return for the publishing rights to the manuscript.’
‘I see. And how long have you been Diane Gilbert’s agent?’
‘Three years.’
‘As long as that? I thought that A Deadly Race was her first book.’
‘It is.’ When Bridget gave him a puzzled look, he elaborated. ‘The cogs of the publishing world don’t turn quickly. Getting a first book into the bookshops is a long haul. First the author has to find an agent, which isn’t easy. Most authors never even make it that far. The agent makes submissions to publishers and, if successful, negotiates a contract. Then the completed manuscript goes through several rounds of editing and proof-reading before its final publication.’
‘I see. So how much contact did you have with Diane during those three years?’
‘Well, quite a lot initially, mostly by phone and email. Then not so much for a long while. But I spoke to her more in recent weeks, in the run-up to the book launch.’
‘And what did you think of her?’
‘Seriously? Diane was an incredible woman. As soon as she wrote to me, I knew she was an author that I wanted to represent.’
‘Why was that exactly?’
‘Diane was a highly-regarded academic and a fearless writer. She didn’t care if what she wrote got her into trouble, she just wanted to get her words out there and have them read. She was already well known within her field, but her book will bring her work to a much wider audience. If there’s a silver lining to this tragedy, it’s that her book will garner a lot more publicity than it would otherwise have done.’
‘I suppose so.’
Bridget waited while the waitress brought the food and drink to the table. She took a quick bite out of the chicken in ciabatta before continuing with her questioning.
‘What do you know about the death threat that Diane received?’
Grant stared mournfully into his coffee. ‘I already told the police all I know.’
‘Perhaps you could tell me again?’
‘All right. Diane told me about it when I was up in Oxford to make arrangements for the literary festival. I went to see her at the Blavatnik, and she showed it to me there. It had arrived by post that morning.’
‘At her work or her home address?’
‘At home.’
‘What did Diane think about the letter?’
‘Not a lot. She was used to getting a ton of hate on social media. To be honest, I think she might secretly have enjoyed it. Some of her tweets – well, it was almost as if she was inviting people to send her abuse. Like I said, she was fearless.’
‘Had she ever reported the abuse to the police?’
‘Not Diane. It wasn’t really in her nature to ask for help.’
‘But she decided to contact the police about the letter?’
‘She wasn’t going to. But her sister, Annabel, was worried, and when she showed it to me, I was concerned too. This didn’t seem like just your usual internet troll. The fact that it had been delivered to her home address showed that the sender knew where she lived. Who would have access to that kind of information?’
Bridget chewed at her chicken. ‘Who do you think might have sent it?’
Grant took a sip of his coffee, drinking it black and unsweetened. ‘I would have thought the answer to that was obvious.’ He cast a nervous glance around the coffee shop and leaned in close to Bridget, lowering his voice. ‘Diane Gilbert was a pain in the British government’s backside. My guess is that they instructed the security services to do away with her.’
‘Is that a serious suggestion?’
‘Absolutely. Have you read her book?’
‘Not all of it,’ said Bridget, thinking of Ffion back at the office, diligently speed-reading her way through the enormous tome. ‘It’s quite long, isn’t it?’
Grant shot her a slightly scornful look. ‘I think you’ll find it’s detailed and meticulously researched. By the time you reach the end, you’ll come to the same conclusion as me.’
Bridget would have to wait for Ffion’s synopsis of the book before she could possibly take a view on the plausibility of Grant’s allegation regarding the security services, so she decided to try a different tack.
‘What did you do last night after the literary event finished?’
‘Me? Why are you asking? I thought you invited me here to talk about Diane.’
‘I did,’ said Bridget. ‘But I’m investigating her murder. So perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me what you did.’ When he remained silent, she sought to reassure him. ‘It’s just a routine question. I’ll be asking everyone I speak to the same thing.’
‘All right,’ he said eventually. ‘I didn’t do very much. After the talk finished, there didn’t seem much point in hanging around, so I had a quick pint at the White Horse and then went back to my hotel and watched rubbish TV for the rest of the night.’
The White Horse was a tiny pub situated directly opposite the Sheldonian Theatre on Broad Street and next to Blackwell’s bookshop. ‘Did you meet anyone you knew in the pub?’ Bridget asked.
‘No,’ said Grant with a scowl.
‘And what time did you get back to the hotel?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did anyone see you return?’
He gave a bitter laugh. ‘I don’t know if you’ve ever stayed in a Travelodge, but it’s not the sort of establishment where a gloved and suited porter welcomes the guests at the front door and bids them goodnight. But maybe the receptionist will remember me coming back. They might even have CCTV footage of me. All part of the surveillance state.’ He drank the rest of his coffee and replaced the cup on the saucer with rather a loud clatter. ‘Look, are we done here? I have people I need to see.’
‘We’re done for now. But will you be remaining in Oxford in case I need to talk to you again?’
‘I’ll be here for another day or two.’
‘Thank you, Mr Sadler. Please do let me know when you plan to leave.’
‘Sure. Whatever.’ He scraped back his chair and stood up, then walked away from the table, leaving Bridget to pay the bill.
8
Bridget was halfway back to St Giles’ when her phone rang. It wasn’t
a number she recognised. ‘Detective Inspector Bridget Hart?’
A man’s voice came over the line, deep but smooth and well-spoken. ‘This is Ian Dunn, Diane’s ex-husband. I understand from Annabel that you’d like to speak to me.’
‘That’s right,’ said Bridget. ‘Thank you for calling me, Mr Dunn’
‘No problem. I just wanted to let you know that our son, Daniel, has arrived from London. He’s with me now, and we’re both available to speak to you if it’s a good time.’
Bridget thanked him and assured him that it was a perfect time. She noted down the address he gave her, and hurried back to her car.
St Andrew’s Road was located in Old Headington, very convenient for the John Radcliffe hospital where, according to Annabel, Ian worked as a consultant. Bridget parked her Mini behind a silver Lexus Coupé and walked up the short garden path to a rather charming ivy-clad, three-storey Georgian house. Tulips, hyacinths and bluebells were in full bloom in the neatly tended borders of the front garden, and a magnificent magnolia took pride of place in the centre, its branches swathed in delicate pink-white flowers. It was the sort of place where you might expect to find the parson from a Jane Austen novel.
No parson opened the door however, but a tall man in his early sixties with a full head of silver-grey hair and a neatly groomed beard. His eyes were a striking blue. ‘Ian Dunn.’ His good looks were matched by his charming manner. He held out a hand and gave Bridget a gleaming smile. ‘Thank you so much for making the time to come and see us, Inspector. It is Inspector Hart, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Bridget, accepting the handshake. ‘And it’s no trouble at all. It’s part of my job to speak to as many people as possible who were connected to the victim. It helps me to build up as broad a picture as I can. But first, may I offer my condolences. The news must have come as a rather nasty shock.’
‘It did,’ said Ian, stroking his beard with one hand. ‘But of course we’ll be more than happy to answer any questions you might have about Diane. Come on in. We’re just through here.’