‘It’s the After Eights,’ said Elizabeth. ‘He’s addicted.’

‘Has that little bastard been eating my After Eights?’ asked George, sitting up in annoyance. ‘As if things aren’t bad enough. You know I look forward to them of an evening.’

Ustym Karmaliuk gathered all his energy and began to make his way towards the pool of sick with the clear intention of ingesting the constituents for a second time, but as he trudged along, he suddenly froze in the most dramatic fashion, looked around at each member of the family in turn, before narrowing his eyes in an attitude of accusation and allowing his head to slump forward.

‘What just happened?’ asked Elizabeth.

‘I think he might have died,’ said Achilles, reaching down and picking the tortoise up. He felt a momentary pang of remorse for having prophesied the tortoise’s death in this exact way earlier in the evening, although he had no intention of using Jeremy’s remuneration to return him to his ancestral home for a hero’s funeral. ‘Where do you find a tortoise’s pulse?’

‘In his neck,’ said Beverley. ‘It always throbbed in a rather erotic fashion, I thought.’

‘Well, it’s not throbbing now,’ said Achilles. ‘And look, his eyes have gone all black. Fuck me, we’ve killed the tortoise.’

The Cleverleys stood up and gathered around, staring down at the non-responsive vertebrate in Achilles’ hands.

‘Well, now,’ said George after a suitable pause. ‘That’s that, then. What do we do now, throw him in the bin?’

‘He won’t flush down the toilet, that’s for sure,’ said Elizabeth.

‘We could just chuck him in the bushes and let the foxes carry him off,’ suggested Achilles.

‘You’ll do nothing of the sort,’ said Beverley, who, to her family’s surprise, had started weeping. ‘I’ll put him back in his box and sort him out tomorrow. He was happy there.’

‘How can you tell?’ asked Elizabeth.

‘A mother knows.’

‘But you weren’t his mother.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ she snapped. ‘He was a lovely tortoise and should be treated with respect at this tragic moment.’

‘He was,’ agreed George, seeing how upset his wife was and not wishing to cause her any further pain.

‘The best of us all,’ said Beverley.

‘Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far.’

‘He was 115 years old, wasn’t he?’ asked Achilles, falling to his knees and raising his hands to the heavens, replicating the image on the poster for Platoon. ‘Why are the good ones always taken so young? Why? Oh, sweet Jesus, WHY?’

‘Shut up, Achilles,’ said George. ‘You’re an idiot.’

‘I’d started to grow very fond of that tortoise,’ said Beverley. ‘There was something dignified about him, I thought. He reminded me of Ted Heath in his last years in the Commons. Just sitting there, observing, keeping his own counsel. Occasionally going to the bathroom in an inappropriate place. Achilles, clean this floor up. I’m going to bed.’

And with that, she took hold of the dead reptile, placed him carefully back into his shoe box, before covering it with a lid and going upstairs, where she fell quickly asleep.