Preface to Murder

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