Free Carnage on the Committee by Ruth Dudley Edwards Page B

adulation and wealth. It's a mixture of luck and self-promotion. Thomas Gray had it right. "Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest" and all that... Oh, sorry, Mr Milton. I forgot. You must get very fed up with that quotation.'
    'Not really, sir. Police and criminals don't quote much poetry.'
    'Gray, of course, was talking about illiterates, who don't know they could have been Milton. But what about those writers who've produced the book, believe it's good and can't get it published, or iff it does get published, it's ignored and they see contemporaries streaking ahead of them for no reason except that they're young, sexy, lucky in their timing or geniuses at self-promotion or networking. So that's why there's so much anger and backbiting in that world - far more in my experience than you get in normal life - and for all I know some of it was directed at Hermione because of her success.'
    Milton looked at Rawlinson rather uncertainly. 'Are you suggesting, sir, that there were those who might have felt that Lady Babcock had been more successful than she deserved?'
    Rawlinson smiled. 'There were. Plenty, in fact. A lot of people didn't like Hermione; there were snide comments in the press and quite a few expressions of outrage that she won the Warburton. There was an awful lot of money involved, after all. It wasn't just the prestige. Indeed, I remember several really disagreeable articles. But murder's a different matter.'
    'No one comes to mind in her personal life who might actually have wanted to kill her?'
    'Absolutely not. No likely murderers in the family, or as far as I know, among friends.'
    'I was just going to ask you about her family. Sir William. I know her parents are dead, that she was divorced and that she has two children.'
    'Ralph Babcock is still about, but Hermione hardly ever saw him. Joshua lives in Hong Kong and Alex in New York. They'll both be back here for the funeral, whenever that'll be. Then there's her sister, Flora, but they were not close.'
    'That'll be Dame Flora Massingham, will it?' asked Pooley.
    'Yes.'
    'We'll need to talk to all of them,' said Milton.
    'Speak to my secretary and she'll give you the phone numbers and anything else you want.' He looked at his watch. 'I have to leave shortly. I have an urgent meeting.'
    'Her close friends. Sir William?'
    'Hermione didn't go in for intimate friends in the way that women do - you know, old school and university friends, that kind of thing. She specialised in occupational friendship. Currently, she was particularly thick with Wysteria Wilcox and Rosa Karp, but as much for professional reasons as anything else. I'll think about it in the car and if any names come to mind I'll tell my secretary to give you the details.'
    'There has been some speculation about rows on the Warburton committee, sir.'
    'Which will intensify, no doubt, when people realise that their last meeting happened within the ricin incubation period. But I'm damned if I can believe that one of her colleagues bumped her off because she didn't agree with them about some novel or other. They'd have to be raving mad. I know they had rows and I suppose a fist fight might be imaginable at the stage when the winner is chosen, but the notion that someone would be murdered before even the long-list stage is too preposterous for even a thriller-writer.'
    'There could be other motives, sir, since some of the judges knew each other quite well.'
    'Let me think.' Rawlinson licked the names off on his fingers as he spoke. 'I've mentioned Wysteria and Rosa. And Hermione knew that ghastly Den Smith well and wrote for his awful magazine sometimes. So those are three she got on well with. Who else was there?'
    'Professor Felix Ferriter,' said Pooley.
    'Oh, lord. Yes, she talked a bit about him, but I couldn't understand what she was driving at. Literary criticism is a closed book to me. And they seemed to get on too. Who didn't she like? Oh, yes. She complained often about that peculiar Welsh