Something impeded the door’s smooth opening. Weird, she thought. It had been fine just now. She pushed harder. It yielded a little way, just enough for her to squeeze through, but it felt as though an object had been placed behind to block it.

It was only when she got inside that Meredith realised. It wasn’t an object.

It was Ralph, lying face up on the cold, damp floor. When her torch beam, shaking wildly, found his face, he was purple and distended-looking, popped blood vessels in his cheeks forming tributaries around the scratch her ring had inflicted; his staring eyes bulging with death’s outrage. She had only been gone for ten minutes at the most. How could this possibly have happened?

‘Ralph!’ She crouched next to him, ripping at his tie and shirt, squishing two fingers into the underside of his wrist to try and find a pulse. Nothing. ‘Fuck! Ralph! Wake up!’

Meredith lifted his wrist and tried again. Still nothing. She pulled his shirt out of his trousers and ripped it open from the bottom up – he was wearing a tie and it seemed too difficult to try and loosen it from the top. Buttons bounced all over the floor as she commenced CPR, her shaking fingers interlocked as she pounded his chest and breathed into his whisky-sour mouth, pounded and breathed. She needed to call an ambulance but didn’t dare stop. Oh God, this is a nightmare. She didn’t realise she was crying till the tears splashed on her locked-together hands.

She had no idea how long she tried to revive him, just that it wasn’t working. She opened the door fully to let more light in and saw that his darkened face was already settling into a kind of livid rigidity, as if preparing for rigor mortis.

‘Ralph’s dead, Ralph’s dead, Ralph’s dead,’ she chanted like a mantra with every chest compression. The house had a portable defibrillator, but it was miles away, in the ticket office, which was in the gatehouse entrance across the courtyard. It would take far too long to go and get it.

She ran outside and threw up in the bushes, vomiting Jack Daniels and guilt and horror.

How was she going to explain what Ralph was doing in the ice house? Perhaps she wouldn’t have to. Perhaps she could just tell the police that they’d both been working late and he had taken her down there to show her what the interior looked like, because she’d always wanted to see it. That was reasonable. She’d dropped her key – in fact, there it was, lying half under his right calf. Meredith retrieved it and stuck it back in her skirt pocket. She’d gone back for it, and found him like this. It was the truth.

But … but … also true were the following additional facts:

He was blind drunk.

Her DNA would be on his penis.