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others?’ I asked.
    He gave me a guilty look. ‘No-I sort of lost them,’ he said. ‘I was . . . looking around.’
    Then I heard a voice in the distance yelling: ‘Robert!’
    ‘Let’s go that way,’ I said, pointing in the direction of the distance. Another couple of turns of the corridor took us to a little gaggle of people in evening
dress, standing on what was clearly the wrong side of an oak door. They looked worried.
    ‘Robert!’ Colin was calling through the keyhole.
    ‘Has he moved?’ asked Gerald.
    This seemed to be an ongoing conversation, because Colin just shook his head briefly. ‘All just as before. Maybe . . . how much had he had to drink?’
    ‘What’s Annabelle doing?’ asked Felicity in an irritated manner. ‘Surely she’s got round to the window by now? It’s ridiculous that a key
can’t be found.’
    ‘I should have gone with her,’ said Colin. ‘I said that at the time.’
    ‘She’s got Ethelred with her,’ I said.
    They all turned and looked at me at this point. Felicity said: ‘Fat lot of good he’ll be.’
    ‘You should have gone with Annabelle,’ said Fiona.
    ‘I said that at the time,’ said Colin.
    ‘Did you?’ said Fiona.
    ‘Did I what?’ asked Colin.
    Yes, in a crisis, this was precisely the conversation we were having. We were, frankly, a total shower and (with one exception) all drunk enough to believe that we alone had the
solution.
    ‘Somebody should phone for an ambulance now,’ said Felicity. ‘This is getting ridiculous.’
    ‘There’s a doctor here already,’ said Fiona, slurring her words only slightly. ‘Two actually.’
    ‘No, somebody phone,’ said Colin, still kneeling by the door. ‘He must have had a heart attack or something. And if Annabelle doesn’t appear in a moment,
I’m breaking the door down.’
    ‘That’s a pretty solid door,’ said Clive, studying it for the first time.
    ‘There must be something we could use as a battering ram,’ said Colin. ‘Somebody should go and look for an oak bench.’ That Muntham Court might contain
an oak bench was a reasonable theory, but nobody seemed capable of carrying out the necessary empirical research. Gerald glanced around vaguely as though a bench might suddenly appear. If Robert
wanted manly action, he had wined and dined us a little too well.
    ‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.
    ‘Just arrived,’ said Colin. ‘We sort of got lost. But Annabelle and the others must have been here for five minutes or so.’
    ‘We were being shown round,’ said Jane, slightly diffidently. ‘We got lost, too, then we found Annabelle here outside the library. She tried the door, but it
was locked, so we knocked, obviously. When nobody opened it, we looked through the keyhole. Robert’s in there, but slumped over his desk. Annabelle said that the quickest thing was to break
in through one of the windows.’
    ‘Is anyone calling an ambulance?’ asked Colin.
    ‘I’m onto it,’ said Fiona, tapping numbers into her mobile. ‘Damn – this is a whole lot easier when you’re sober,’ she added. She tried
999 again, but this time very slowly.
    ‘Let’s smash the door down then,’ said Clive, with a confidence that marked him out as the drunkest of the party. The oak bench had not appeared, but he was
still up for it – a shoulder charge against a solid oak door obviously seemed to Clive both prudent and likely to be effective.
    It was perhaps as well that, at that very moment, we heard the sound of breaking glass somewhere inside the room.
    ‘That could be the cavalry arriving,’ said Clive, with more than a trace of disappointment in his voice. The chance to kick a door in comes rarely to most
people.
    ‘I can see two figures at the window,’ said Colin, who had refused to give up his vantage point by the keyhole. ‘One of them has got the window open and is
climbing in – that’s Ethelred. Good man. Now Annabelle’s in.’
    ‘Ambulance on its way,’ said