Preface to Murder

by M S Morris

  ‘Okay, good.’ It was of course conceivable that Ian had attended the party with the express intention of creating an alibi for himself, and then committed the murder on his return to Oxford, but that required the meticulous planning and ruthless efficiency of a criminal mastermind. As far as Bridget could tell, the guy didn’t even have a motive, having been amicably divorced from his ex-wife for many years, and not benefitting in any way from her will.

  Bridget turned her attention next to Ffion. The young constable was sitting with Diane’s book on her lap. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance you managed to finish your reading assignment?’ Bridget asked her.

  Ffion gave the enormous book a pat. ‘Cover to cover.’

  ‘Very impressive. And what was your verdict?’

  ‘On Diane’s political viewpoint? I think she makes some good points, but she only considers one side of the argument.’

  ‘I meant on whether it sheds any light on her murder.’

  Ffion didn’t blink before responding. ‘The book’s central thesis is that the British and American governments collude with the companies that manufacture and export weapons, in order to supply regimes that they know to be repressive. She claims they do this not just for commercial advantage, but also to further their own expansionist geopolitical agendas. On the basis of what I read in her book, various countries must have regarded her as a threat to their national security. In particular, the British, American and Saudi Arabian governments.’

  This was the last thing Bridget had hoped to hear. But it confirmed what Grant Sadler had told her at the coffee shop. In particular he had pointed the finger at the British security services. She told the rest of her team what the literary agent had said.

  ‘With all respect, ma’am,’ said Ryan, ‘surely you can’t seriously believe that Diane Gilbert was assassinated by MI5? I think you’ve been reading too many John le Carré novels.’

  Bridget’s problem was that she never had enough time to read novels of any kind. But Ryan was right. It was far too soon to start pointing the finger at governments and security services.

  ‘But, she’s dead, isn’t she?’ retorted Ffion. ‘So someone must have killed her, and national security is an obvious reason. The method of killing suggests a professional assassination. Don’t forget about the death threat, either.’

  ‘Where are we with that?’ asked Bridget. ‘Have forensics finished with the letter yet?’

  ‘Their report came in late yesterday afternoon,’ said Ryan, producing a short document. He paged through it, reading out the highlights. ‘The letter was sent in an envelope postmarked central London. The type of paper used was cheap lined paper from a refill pad, and the envelope was of the white self-sealing kind, so there was no DNA from saliva. It was written with a fountain pen using blue ink from a Parker cartridge. Nothing particularly expensive, just the sort of item you can buy from WH Smith’s. The handwriting itself is unremarkable. Obviously we have nothing to compare it with, but in the opinion of the handwriting expert, the writer didn’t bother to disguise their writing style. She points out that the writing is fluid and shows no signs of pen lifts or words being restarted. So if we were able to obtain a sample of writing from a suspect, we’d probably have a good chance of matching it.’

  ‘Any fingerprints?’ asked Bridget, ever hopeful.

  ‘Only the victim’s own prints, and those of the literary agent and the publisher, who she showed it to. Presumably the writer wore gloves while writing and posting the letter. There were no hairs or fibres either.’

  ‘So we have no fingerprints, no DNA, no footprints, no physical evidence of any kind.’ Bridget had checked for emails from Vik on first arriving at work that morning, but the SOCO team had still not unearthed anything she could use. She would have liked to give Ffion the task of analysing the victim’s mobile phone and laptop, but frustratingly those items were still with forensics.

  Andy raised his hand to speak again. ‘After Harry and I got back from the door-to-door, I had time to do a bit of background research on the victim.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Bridget.

  ‘Well, it seems she was arrested a few times back in the early nineteen-eighties for protesting at Greenham Common.’ He produced a black and white photograph from a newspaper and passed it over to Bridget, who pinned it to the board for everyone to see. The year of publication was 1982. The picture showed a much younger Diane Gilbert being forcibly dragged through the mud by a pair of helmeted bobbies.

  News of Diane’s past political activism didn’t greatly surprise Bridget, given what she already knew about the academic. The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp had become famous – or infamous – during the eighties because of the hundreds of women who camped outside the RAF base in Berkshire to protest at the decision of the British government to allow American cruise missiles to be deployed there. Margaret Thatcher had been in Number Ten at the time and the effects of free market capitalism were just beginning to make themselves felt in the economic boom in the City of London. Other parts of the country, with an industrial base rooted in the previous century, were faring less well. It had been a turbulent time in British history, and Diane Gilbert would have been a young woman, full of political conviction and self-righteous indignation. Greenham Common would have been her natural habitat.

  ‘So it’s very likely that MI5 have a file on her dating back a few decades,’ concluded Andy. ‘And given what we know about her recent activities, they may have continued to watch her.’

  Bridget thanked Andy for his diligent research. Much as she disliked the idea, all the available evidence seemed to be pointing in the direction of a national security connection, and she couldn’t afford to ignore it. ‘The Chief Super is on the case, knocking on the doors of power to see what he can find out. In the meantime, let’s work with what we’ve got. Jake, Ryan, I’d like you to go back to the Blavatnik School of Government and talk to the rest of Diane’s colleagues. See what you can unearth, bearing in mind everything we’ve talked about this morning.’

  ‘We’re on it, ma’am,’ said Jake.

  ‘Andy, carry on with your background checks. I want to know everything there is to know about Diane and her political activities. Harry, start following up on her phone records.’ She turned to Ffion. ‘You can come with me. I think that after spending all of yesterday with your head in a book, you could probably use some fresh air.’

  12

  The wall that bounded Diane Gilbert’s back garden stood eight feet tall. Bridget looked up at it doubtfully. It would be impossible for her to climb, and Vik had assured her that there were no footprints or tell-tale marks in the soil beneath the wall that a ladder might have made. But whoever had gained entry to Diane’s house had come and gone somehow.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ asked Bridget. She waited whilst Ffion eyed up the brick wall. At almost six feet in flat shoes, Ffion could just about reach the top if she stood on tiptoes.

  ‘You want me to give it a go?’

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ said Bridget.

  Ffion accepted the unusual request without comment, appearing to relish the challenge. She bent forward and touched her toes, jogged on the spot for a moment, then took a running leap at the wall. She managed to grab hold of the top, but even with her long legs she struggled to gain a foothold on the vertical surface. She tried swinging her right leg up to the top of the wall, but it was simply too far. For a moment she hung there, suspended above the shrubbery, then let herself drop back down, landing with a feline grace. She returned to Bridget, rubbing mud and moss from her hands, looking obviously disappointed not to have made it over the top.

  ‘Good try,’ said Bridget. ‘You proved the point.’ She indicated the deep impressions that Ffion had left in the soil of the flowerbed. ‘Even if someone had managed to climb over, they would have left clear marks behind. And Vik assured me that there were no marks.’

  ‘So if they didn’t come over the top, might they have come thro
ugh that door?’ asked Ffion, pointing to the solid wooden door in the wall.

  ‘Not unless they had the key,’ said Bridget. The door fitted flush to the wall, and was secured with a standard mortice lock. ‘The key was found hanging in the kitchen. And since the intruder had to break the glass in the kitchen door to get into the house, it’s unlikely they would have had a key to the garden door. In any case, it was locked when Vik’s team examined it. Why would someone bother to lock the garden gate after smashing open the kitchen door? It doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘No,’ said Ffion, ‘so we still have no idea how they got in?’

  Bridget was reluctant to admit that the most obvious explanation was staring her in the face – that Sam and Scott had not been telling the truth about staying on guard all night. If it could be proved that they had lied to her, their careers might well be over before they had barely started. She felt a stab of pity, but also a fair amount of anger.

  They walked round the rest of the garden, but there was no obvious way by which the intruder might have entered, if not through the front driveway. Bridget re-examined the garden shed, but it was firmly padlocked as before. An inspection of the garage revealed nothing new either. With a sigh, Bridget had to accept that they would be unable to solve this particular part of the mystery by further examination of the grounds.

  ‘Let’s take a look inside the house.’

  The back entrance was sealed off with crime tape, and broken glass still littered the kitchen floor, so they circled round to the front of the house where a uniformed constable let them inside.

  The broken pane of glass in the kitchen door was letting the damp April air inside, and the house had taken on a chill feel. Bridget kept her coat on as she and Ffion began their examination of the ground floor.

  In the kitchen, everything seemed to be in order apart from the break-in itself, but the room offered few clues to Diane Gilbert the person.

  ‘She had good taste,’ said Ffion, inspecting the polished granite worktop, sleek chrome fittings, high-spec gadgets and multi-function hob.

  ‘And the money to indulge it,’ said Bridget. It was obvious that Diane had been able to afford the best quality on offer in the showroom. Presented to such a high standard, the massive Victorian house located in the highly sought-after area of North Oxford would command an eye-watering sum on the property market. Diane’s son, Daniel, stood to inherit a small fortune. Not so small, in fact.

  It was certainly a far cry from the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common where Diane had spent her protest years. Bridget pictured groups of women huddled around camping stoves, singing rousing songs and living off tins of baked beans. Clearly, it was possible to tire of such a lifestyle.

  They moved on to the dining room, which backed onto the rear garden, commanding views over the long lawn all the way to the far wall. In summer, with a display of flowers outside, it would be a glorious vista. Even on this slightly overcast April morning, the purple and yellow cups of tulips helped lift the spirits.

  Just like the kitchen, the room was designed to impress, with a modern crystal chandelier hanging from the central ceiling rose, and abstract works of art adorning the walls. The table seated eight people in its leather high-backed chairs. But once again, there was something soulless and untouched about the room that gave Bridget the feeling that it had never hosted the sort of large dinner party that it was clearly intended for. If she’d been hoping to find a clue to Diane’s personal life from her home, perhaps the main takeaway was that Diane had no personal life. For the high-powered academic, work had meant everything.

  They entered the lounge.

  The south-facing bay window of the room overlooked the front garden, letting soft light flood into the high-ceilinged room. To either side of the marble fireplace, the alcoves accommodated shelves tightly packed with books. Bridget scanned the titles on the spines. The books were mostly about politics, in particular the geopolitics of the Middle East and international relations, but there was also quite a collection covering surveillance, the secret state, and code-breaking. There was little in the way of fiction. Bridget recognised a heavyweight American novel that had won the Pulitzer Prize a few years back. Vanessa had given her a copy that year for Christmas, and Bridget had gamely ploughed through the first hundred pages before admitting defeat and donating the book to a charity shop, where she hoped it might find a more dedicated reader.

  The bottom shelf was taller and contained what appeared to be photograph albums. Perhaps this would finally reveal something about the real Diane Gilbert. A cream-coloured album caught Bridget’s eye and she pulled it from the shelf. It was a wedding album.

  Diane may have divorced her husband a decade earlier but here, preserved for eternity beneath thin layers of tissue, a snapshot of her and Ian’s story was revealed.

  The wedding had taken place at Oxford’s registry office with a reception at some country house hotel, the bride wearing a floor-length dress in pure white silk, the groom in traditional morning suit with a silver waistcoat. An order of service tucked into a sleeve at the front of the album revealed that the date had been June 1983. In those days, just two years after the wedding of Princess Diana to Prince Charles, it had been almost impossible to find a bride clothed in anything but virgin white. It was clearly the height of summer because it was a gloriously sunny day and, apart from Diane herself, all the women had bare arms. The only other people Bridget recognised in the photographs were Diane’s sister, Annabel, and Annabel’s late husband, John, though whether the couple had been married back then, Bridget didn’t know.

  She recalled the black and white photo of Diane getting arrested at the Greenham Common protests, taken when she was just a year younger. It seemed that Diane had moved on from her anti-nuclear protesting relatively quickly, and settled down to embrace a more conventional married life. The change clearly hadn’t done her any harm – in the photographs here she appeared to be radiantly happy. Bridget’s own wedding day had been one of the happiest days of her life. Neither she, nor Diane – nor Princess Diana, for that matter – could have had any inkling that the marriage would one day end in divorce.

  Ffion was sitting cross-legged on the floor turning rapidly through the pages of the other albums.

  ‘Anything interesting?’ asked Bridget.

  ‘Lots of pictures of her son growing up,’ said Ffion. She handed Bridget a couple of albums and she began to turn the pages. ‘People would just share all this stuff online now,’ continued Ffion, ‘but I suppose back then you had to print the photos and stick them in an album.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bridget, who still remembered taking rolls of film along to the local camera shop to be developed, and returning to collect the prints days later. Someone as young as Ffion probably couldn’t even begin to imagine such a world.

  It didn’t take Bridget long to discover that while Diane and Ian had been the focus of attention in the wedding album, these other albums were all about their son. Bridget skimmed through picture after picture of Daniel growing up – from cute baby to chocolate-smeared toddler; from knock-kneed infant schoolboy to bashful teenager. According to Daniel, his mother was never there for him growing up, but the evidence contained in these pages didn’t support that view. In fact they suggested that Diane had been far more of a doting parent than Daniel had given her credit for.

  For the first time since their initial meeting, Bridget began to feel some sympathy towards the murdered academic. It was crystal clear now that Diane had loved her son very much, and yet in his eyes she had been a cold, indifferent mother – one that he had ultimately rejected. Perhaps that was why Diane cultivated such a hard, unfeeling exterior, and why she had never remarried – to protect herself from future heartbreak. Bridget thought once more of Chloe, and a cold fear filled her heart at the prospect of her own daughter ever turning her back on her. She would not allow that to happen. However hard Ben tried to infiltrate himself into their daughter’s life, no matter how
Chloe responded, Bridget resolved always to be there for her, and to support her in whatever choices she made. Alfie, Chloe’s boyfriend, would be joining them all for lunch at Vanessa’s on Sunday – proof no doubt of just how far the relationship had come – and Bridget was determined to be on her best behaviour and say nothing that would embarrass her daughter in his presence.

  The final photograph in the album had been taken at Daniel’s graduation ceremony at Durham. There, Diane and Ian stood either side of their son, but there was a distant look on their faces, as if the marriage was already showing signs of the fault lines that would result in their so-called amicable divorce. Despite Ian Dunn’s assertion that the split had been without rancour, Bridget wasn’t sure that any marriage could fail without recrimination and resentment. But maybe that was her own personal experience colouring her view, and other people were able to handle the matter more maturely.

  Ffion handed her another album, this one red, and Bridget opened it, expecting to find yet more pictures of Daniel as a child, but this album was older than all the others. On the inside front cover someone had written Italian tour, April 1983. The same year as Diane and Ian’s wedding. Bridget had a fondness for all things Italian – pasta, Chianti, opera, art, sun, piazzas, and, of course, gelato – and couldn’t resist turning the pages for a sneak peek. The pictures told her that in the spring of that year, Diane, Ian, Annabel and John had embarked on a three-week road trip around Italy in a Fiat Panda. The two sisters and their respective boyfriends had started in Milan, detoured to Venice via Verona, then worked their way down the spine of the country, sampling the architectural and culinary delights of Bologna, Florence and Rome before arriving in Naples. In the shadow of Vesuvius, they had rented a palazzo-style villa of quite idyllic charm. A photograph that had presumably been taken by an obliging local showed both couples seated around an outside dining table laden with mouth-watering bowls of pasta and glasses of red wine.