“We’re not friends,” she said with an at-last-somebody-gets-it expression. “I’ve got friends. I assume you’ve got friends. I don’t see why we can’t just accept that the only thing we have in common with each other is that our inadequate paycheques are signed by the same people.”

“Exactly.” This was actually turning into one of my better work conversations. “Tell you what, how about we make a deal. I won’t invite you to my wedding, and in return, you don’t have to tell me anything about your life or give a single shit about mine.”

She held out a hand. “Done.”

I shook it and did my best to smile at her.

“But I don’t hate you,” she added.

“I don’t hate you either.”

She let go of my hand. “And…let’s leave it at that.”

Oliver had finished talking to whoever he was talking to, but from the look of very mild frustration on his face—he’d gone into professional mode, so very mild frustration was the worst he was going to show—he hadn’t got anywhere. “They’re being stubborn,” he explained.

“Are we going to prison?” I asked. “Are we going to prison for breaking and entering? Did we break and enter on the way to a wedding?”

Oliver pulled up a blue plastic chair and sat down next to me. “How much detail do you want on this?”

Damn, he was sexy when he was doing the lawyer bit. “All the detail.”

“If you insist.” He smiled, and everybody else—mistaking my request for interrogation rather than flirtation—gathered round. Well, everybody except for Professor Fairclough, who was looking at a spider, even though, as I was embarrassingly proud to remember, it wasn’t technically an insect.

“For a start,” Oliver continued, somewhat surprised to suddenly have an audience. “We’re not going to prison for breaking and entering because that’s not a distinct crime under UK law. Burglary is a crime, and trespassing is a civil infraction. We did trespass, but it only becomes burglary if the Crown can show that we trespassed with the intent to either steal or commit grievous bodily harm or unlawful damage.”

“We stole tea,” Barbara Clench pointed out, with the pedantic attention to detail that made her frustratingly good at her job.

“Technically we didn’t,” said Oliver. “We drank tea that didn’t belong to us, but stealing is when you dishonestly appropriate property belonging to another person with the intent to permanently deprive them of it. Of those five elements—”

“How do you get five elements out of one sentence?” I asked, partly because I liked playing my part in the law-is-cool-and-you’re-cool-for-knowing-it game we sometimes played and partly because I was genuinely confused.

“Dishonesty”—Oliver counted on his fingers—“property, appropriation, belonging to another person, and intent to permanently deprive.” He held up his open hand. “Five.”