“Maybe.” Oliver gave a little shrug. “But then we’d live in a world where the law says you’re allowed to commit crimes if you think you’ve got a good reason. And who decides what a good reason is? It’s like the it’s-only-tea defence. If the law said that stealing only counted as stealing if you took something of significant monetary value, that would mean the law saw stealing a cup of tea from a poor person as a less serious crime than stealing a bottle of expensive wine from a rich person, and that doesn’t seem very just.” He sighed. “I’m under no illusions about our legal system, I assure you. It has vast structural flaws, and miscarriages of justice absolutely do happen, in both directions. But it’s the best system we’ve got, and its problems generally aren’t what people think they are.”

“And”—I reached out and touched him on the shoulder, partly out of affection and partly out of a need for reassurance—“we’re okay, aren’t we? We’re not going to become, like, the Cup of Tea Seven or something?”

Oliver shook his head. “Fortunately for us, one of the vast structural flaws in our legal system is that being a group of white middle-class people on the way to an exclusive society wedding at which I suspect at least one guest will be an actual high court judge, the establishment is very much working in our favour.”

Well, that was a relief. In a checking-your-privilege kind of way. Of course they didn’t have to charge us with anything to hold us for long enough to make us unfashionably late for Alex and Miffy’s wedding, although given that it was going to be this massive posh bonanza full of aristos and arseholes, maybe that would be a blessing.

For a while we sat quietly, contemplating our fate. Then Rhys said, “You know what I don’t get?”

“What don’t you get?” asked Ana with one n so that I didn’t have to.

The perplexed look on Rhys’s face would have been comical if it wasn’t so sincere. “I don’t get why Charlie gave us directions to somebody else’s house.”

Chapter 22

THEY COULD HOLD US, OLIVER said, for twenty-four hours pretty much no questions asked. And I was beginning to think they were going to use all of it when I heard a titanic commotion coming from elsewhere in the police station.

“Completely unacceptable,” one voice was saying—not a voice I recognised.

“What do you expect in this part of the country,” another voice was saying, and this one I thought I recognised but couldn’t tell from where. “Bloody Welsh and Irish everywhere.”

“I say, steady on, Randy.” And that was a voice I recognised. That was Alex Twaddle. “There’s a Welsh chappy I work with and he’s fearfully pleasant.”