Aspire to Die: An Oxford Murder Mystery (Bridget Hart Book 1) Read online

  Aspire to Die

  An Oxford Murder Mystery

  Bridget Hart Book 1

  M S Morris

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  M S Morris have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  msmorrisbooks.com

  Published by Landmark Media, a division of Landmark Internet Ltd.

  Copyright © 2019 Margarita Morris and Steve Morris

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  Thank you for reading

  1

  Lust and ambition are the driving forces of tragedy. Discuss.

  Sophie Hinton tossed and turned in her narrow college bed. It was hard to sleep when your dreams were filled with bloody daggers and lustful desires.

  She’d been up until gone midnight finishing her essay for today’s tutorial. Lust, ambition, tragedy. A heady mix. Turned out, Shakespeare thought so too. She had filled twenty closely-typed pages with references to the bard’s plays where lust or ambition drove the action. She hoped she’d finally managed to nail down all the pertinent points, but as she turned out her bedside light in the early hours she was suddenly overwhelmed by doubts. No wonder she’d had such troubled dreams.

  Now it was too late for sleep. Bright sunlight streamed through the thin curtains of the room, reaching warm fingers across the wooden floor. She slid out of bed, rubbing her tired eyes, and stumbled into the shower.

  Lust and ambition. Sophie didn’t consider herself to be particularly lustful or ambitious. Timid, shy and anxious were words she would use to describe herself, and her weekly tutorial, where she would be required to read her essay aloud in front of her tutor, Dr Claiborne, was almost designed to induce terror in someone like her. She really would like to show her essay to someone first, and there was only one person she trusted to give her an honest opinion. Zara Hamilton.

  Before coming to Oxford, Sophie would never have imagined befriending someone like Zara. Zara was everything that Sophie wasn’t: rich, privately educated, beautiful and confident. Yet they had formed a firm bond of friendship since starting at the university and finding themselves paired as tutorial partners.

  It was easy to be friends with Zara. She held no prejudices and had a ready smile for everyone. She was very different to her twin brother, Zac, also at Christ Church college. Zac shared Zara’s good looks, but mixed only with those he considered to be his social equals, which didn’t include Sophie. Zac Hamilton was certainly a man driven by ambition.

  Sophie turned off the shower and rubbed herself vigorously with the towel. It was just after nine o’clock. That gave her almost three hours before the tutorial began, and conveniently Dr Claiborne’s room was on the same staircase as Zara’s. She finished getting herself ready, scooped up her laptop and sped off down the stairs.

  One of the college scouts, Val, was mopping the floor at the foot of Sophie’s staircase in the Meadow Building. She looked up from her work as Sophie descended the stairs. ‘Morning,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Lovely day.’

  ‘Lovely,’ agreed Sophie, tiptoeing over the damp floor. Scout was one of those peculiar Oxford words that didn’t seem to have the same meaning as it did elsewhere. At school Sophie had understood it to mean a person sent ahead to carry out reconnaissance. Here it meant cleaner.

  ‘But I’m already behind my normal schedule,’ complained Val. ‘I’ve been clearing up the mess in the dean’s lodgings after the drinks party last night.’ She rolled her eyes in an exaggerated way. ‘Sue in the kitchen said she spent most of the day preparing trays of fancy canapés. I asked my husband what it was for but he didn’t know.’

  Val’s husband was Jim Turner, the head porter of the college. They were both near retirement. Sue in the kitchen was presumably one of Val’s many spies operating within the college underbelly.

  Sophie had a sudden vision of Val as spy master controlling a vast network of informers threaded throughout the college – cleaning staircases, working in kitchens, eavesdropping eagerly outside closed doors. Each one glimpsed a worm’s eye view of great events. Perhaps the woman really was a scout in both senses of the word.

  Lust, ambition and tragedy. Val must be privy to them all.

  She showed no inclination to keep her hard-won secrets to herself. ‘Whatever it was, the drinks certainly flowed freely, judging by the number of empty bottles and used glasses.’ She lowered her voice confidentially. ‘I don’t care much for this new dean, you know, not that he’s all that new, but when you’ve been around for as long as I have, I feel entitled to call him new. I’ve seen a few deans in my time and this one reminds me of a politician. Too ambitious by half. Not like the old dean. He was a proper gentleman.’

  Val would talk all day long if you let her. Sophie nodded politely and made her exit. She knew secrets too, but unlike Val she kept them close.

  She slowed her pace as she made her way across the great quadrangle – Tom Quad, to give it its popular name. The sixteenth-century sandstone walls gleamed golden in the morning sun; in the central pond, surrounded by water lilies, the statue of Mercury – god of financial gain and messages – balanced on one foot atop his pedestal; and on the west side, the great clock tower known affectionately as Tom Tower soared skywards.

  Eight muscular rowers and their skinny cox were gathering in the lodge beneath the clock tower, all clad in matching one-piece Lycra rowing suits. It was the men’s first team. The tallest of the rowers was Zara’s boyfriend, Adam Brady. Adam was a man filled with both lust and ambition. Sophie studied him closely. If she allowed her imagination to roam freely, she could easily feel a stirring of lust herself. Adam seemed to be staring back at her, his eyes shadowed beneath unruly black hair, his powerful arms flexing in preparation for the run to the boathouse.

  His gaze held hers for a moment, but she pulled away and pressed on, continuing her path across the quad to Zara’s staircase. She pushed open the heavy oak door and stepped inside. The thick stone walls offered shelter from the sun which was already getting hot, and it took a second or two for her eyes to adjust to the dark after the brightness outside.

  Two doors opened onto the ground floor – her tutor’s room and a seminar room that was being redecorated. She crept quietly past them and up the stairs. Dr Claiborne probably wasn’t around yet, but she had no desire to bump into him before the tutorial began.

  She went up to the first floor landing. There were two more rooms on this floor. The first was Megan’s, a girl who was studying Classics. Megan wouldn’t be in her room this early in the morning. She’d be in bed no doubt, but not her own. Megan was no stranger to lust. Sophie turned instead to the other entrance, the door to Zara’s room.

  She knocked quietly and when there was no r
esponse, knocked again louder. The room beyond stayed silent. She took hold of the brass doorknob and twisted it cautiously clockwise. It turned, and with a gentle push the door opened. Sophie peered inside.

  The room beyond was dim, the curtains drawn tightly shut, but even in the semi-darkness Sophie knew that something terrible had happened. Sprawled on the floor was Zara Hamilton, her arms and legs splayed out, unmoving. Beautiful, kind, intelligent Zara. Her head was twisted to one side and her blue eyes stared lifelessly, her mouth hanging open. Her long, angelic hair was sticky with blood which had pooled across the carpet in a crimson stain.

  Sophie put a hand on the door frame to steady herself, but all she could feel was the thudding of her heart. She approached the body cautiously, careful not to step in any blood, nor to touch any surface. She knelt down and laid two fingers on Zara’s neck. She counted to thirty. There was no pulse. She’d known there wouldn’t be.

  Lust and ambition. Which was to blame for Zara’s tragedy? Sophie shook her head, letting tears fall.

  2

  The romantic strains of Verdi’s La Traviata thundered from the kitchen’s sound system, threatening to overwhelm the little house with pathos and drama. Detective Inspector Bridget Hart was enjoying a rare day off work, and she intended to make the most of it.

  First she was going to bake a cake for her daughter Chloe’s fifteenth birthday, then she was going to go swimming. She’d worked so hard for her recent promotion to DI that her exercise routine had fallen by the wayside and her work trousers were becoming ever more snug. This was, in fact, the first day of annual leave allowance that Bridget had succeeded in taking since the start of the year. This evening, when Chloe got home from school, she planned to take her out to a nice little Italian restaurant in North Oxford. Just the two of them, mother and daughter. It would be a real treat. And if she managed forty lengths at the pool and didn’t eat too much during the day, she’d allow herself a bowl of her favourite tagliatelle with truffle cream sauce. A glass of red wine would be the perfect accompaniment. Two glasses perhaps. Or even three. Who was counting? In a moment of Italian abandon, she joined in with one of Violetta’s arias for a few bars, not caring what she sounded like.

  She rummaged in the kitchen cupboard, foraging for ingredients. The last cake she’d baked was for Chloe’s fourteenth birthday last year. Baking, like exercise, was a great invention, but who realistically found time for it? She checked the Use By dates. The flour was a few months out of date, but it looked fine and passed the sniff test. She studied the packet of icing sugar and nearly died when she saw how many calories it contained. Still, it was just once a year, and Chloe and her friends would no doubt eat most of it. She was studying the recipe on her phone, and debating whether she could get away with milk chocolate as a topping or if she needed to go to the shop and buy some dark chocolate as the recipe stipulated, when the phone began to ring.

  Chief Superintendent Alex Grayson’s name flashed up on the screen. No way. Didn’t he know she’d taken the day off? She ignored it. The phone rang again. Could she safely let it go to voicemail? Grayson wasn’t a man who enjoyed leaving messages. He preferred to give orders, directly, and have them obeyed. She let it ring twice more, then turned down the volume on the opera and picked up.

  ‘Hello?’

  The Chief Super always got straight to the point. ‘DI Hart? Suspicious death reported this morning at one of the Oxford colleges. Christ Church. Student. Female. Uniform are on their way to secure the scene. I need a detective to head up the investigation.’

  Bridget grimaced. Since finally being promoted to Detective Inspector, she’d been itching to take on a case suitable for her new rank. This was surely it. But it had come on the worst possible day, her daughter’s birthday. She saw precious little of Chloe as it was, and she hadn’t taken a single day off in six months. Refusing the Chief Super was going to be difficult, but she took a deep breath and said, ‘Actually, sir, I’m taking a day of annual leave today. I was just about to go out.’

  ‘Afraid it can’t be helped,’ said Grayson. ‘There’s no one else. I already called Davis, but he’s about to make a breakthrough with the drugs case in Blackbird Leys, and Baxter’s dealing with the stabbing at the train station. You’re the only one left.’

  Great. She was his third choice. The Chief Super was only calling her because there was no one else, and if she refused to take this case she would drop even lower in his estimation.

  Her recent promotion had been a long time coming and she was under pressure to prove that it had been justified. She had never been one of the boys. She was conscious of being the shortest DI in the team. Although the height requirement for joining the force had long since been removed, old attitudes took time to die. Much like Superintendent Grayson himself, who had been in the job as long as Bridget could remember. She didn’t participate in the beer-swilling and adolescent joke-telling that constituted police social rituals. She didn’t do drinks after work except on rare occasions, and she’d always resisted working overtime as much as possible. And the reason for all that had been simple – Chloe. Being a single parent with a young daughter to get home to had held her back professionally. But now Chloe was older, and this was her chance to finally progress her career.

  ‘All right, no problem,’ she heard herself saying. ‘I’ll be over there right away.’

  ‘Keep me informed.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ But Grayson had already ended the call.

  With a sigh, Bridget returned the calorie-laden baking ingredients to the cupboard. Perhaps they were safer kept in there, especially since it didn’t look like she’d be getting that much-needed exercise after all.

  She went upstairs and changed out of her jeans into smart black trousers, pulling in her stomach as she hauled up the zip. She picked a cream blouse and a grey jacket which she hoped had a slimming effect, although obviously not as effective as actually doing some exercise. She’d planned to wash her hair at the pool, after her swim. The just-got-out-of-bed look didn’t suit her at all but there was no time to wash it properly now. She wet her comb under the tap and ran it through her short, dark bob in a futile effort to get both sides to lie flat. A dab of foundation and a smear of nude lipstick – she had the quickest make-up routine in Oxfordshire – and she was ready to go.

  Her red BMW Mini convertible was parked outside the house, in front of Wolvercote village green. Tucked just inside the northwestern corner of the Oxford ring road, Wolvercote was a small community with a couple of pubs, a church and a family-run corner shop. Bridget owned one of the small terraced cottages in the heart of the village, just big enough for herself and Chloe. Tiny, in other words.

  Two young mothers were pushing their children on the swings by the green, the little boy and girl screaming with delight and chattering animatedly. For Bridget, those early days with her own daughter were a distant memory. When Chloe was younger they used to take a picnic to Port Meadow alongside the River Thames, or explore the ruins of nearby Godstow Abbey. But now Chloe was older she preferred to spend all her time with her friends. She hardly told Bridget anything. Bridget didn’t even know if Chloe had a boyfriend. And her carefully-laid plans to make today special for her daughter’s birthday had just been shot down in flames by the Chief Super. The working mother could never win.

  She climbed into the car and tossed her bag onto the passenger seat. The little car with its iconic design and twin-power turbo engines was one of her few indulgences – a treat for herself on her thirty-fifth birthday three years ago. Even Chloe thought it was cool, which was saying something. Bridget loved the car. She liked to think it reflected herself – sensible and compact, but spirited, with a keen sense of fun. She turned on the ignition and the engine thrummed into life.

  Chloe had already hinted that the Mini would be the perfect car to learn to drive in, but Bridget didn’t want to think about that. She’d seen more than enough fatal crashes in her time with the police, too many of them involving you
ng people on the brink of adulthood. But she’d seen worse too, far worse, and not only since becoming a police officer. Darker fears than traffic accidents haunted Bridget’s dreams, no matter how well she was able to suppress them during daylight hours.

  She pushed her concerns away. She needed to focus on the task ahead. From what the Chief Super had told her, a young woman had lost her life today, and that woman’s family would be depending on Bridget to find answers. The full weight of the responsibility removed any lingering thoughts of birthdays, cakes and dress sizes from her mind. She pulled away from the village green, crossing the bridge over Wolvercote Mill Stream before picking up the Woodstock Road that would take her into the heart of Oxford.

  Driving from North Oxford to Christ Church, just south of the centre, was not as easy as it should have been. Despite Oxford’s main roads having a simple medieval layout – four roads leading north, south, east and west, intersecting at Carfax – the city council had imposed a one-way system that made the journey twice as long as it needed to be.

  Bridget tried to stay calm as she navigated the route, silently cursing modern traffic congestion, all the time keeping an eye out for the dozens of cyclists who thronged the narrow streets, not to mention the foreign tourists, many of whom seemed surprised to discover that cars drove on the left in Britain. The rich operatic melodies of Mozart’s Così fan tutte soared through the car’s speakers, helping to soothe her journey, and on arrival she was pleased to note that she’d only had to honk her horn once.

  An ambulance and two marked police cars were parked outside the main entrance to the college on St Aldate’s, causing havoc with the double-decker buses that clogged the road in both directions. Bridget pulled up behind one of the police cars on double-yellow lines. A traffic warden appeared in her side-view mirror and began to issue her with a ticket, but she rummaged in her bag and pulled out a permit that stopped the warden in his tracks. She slung the bag over her shoulder and hurried through the arched entrance-way beneath the clock tower.