A Piece of Justice Part I

This is the second Imogen Quy novel. Imogen is a college nurse at a Cambridge college who occasionally solves a crime. She has a younger friend, Frances who rents a room from her, and is a graduate student. Frances is hard up and is offered a job, helping to write a biography of a mathematician, Gideon Summerfield, who is well known because he did some innovative work in middle age. He has died recently and a biography is being planned. Fran starts work on the biography and then finds that Janet, Gideon's widow, is interfering with her work. She also learns that 3 other writers had worked on the book before her, and is very startled when she finds that one of them died suddenly and another one, May Swann, has disappeared, leaving her flat and noone has seen her for some time. The first writer did just give up and go travelling. But Imogen feels nervous when she hears of this. Imogen and Fran learn a bit about Gideon through Imogen's friends, whom she knows through her hobby of making quilts. She is working on a new quilt and one of her friends tells her that she knew Gideon's mistress, Melanie, an older lady who has retired. Frances is surprised, as Gideon seemed very dull and she couldn't imagine there was any scandal in his life. But it turns out that he had had an on off affair with Melanie for years, and had other liaisons too, and his wife appeared to tolerate it. But she doesn't want anything about the mistresses to appear in the book. Fran finds when going through his papers that there is a gap of a month or so, during the 70s. He and his friends used to go away and rent a cottage for holidays, and spend the time, drinking, playing Scrabble and fooling around, but apparently, on this holiday, Gideon had a row with the others in his crowd, and left the cottage and disappeared for a few weeks.