Preface to Murder, M Morris [best selling autobiographies TXT] 📗

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