She covered it up with a cough and said a hasty goodbye to Paula. Then she lowered her head to the desk and banged it, gently and repeatedly, on a catalogue of cashmere cushions and picnic blankets.

Unsurprisingly, Ralph’s seat was unoccupied at the start of the meeting. Ceri announced rather crossly that she hadn’t heard from him.

The Earl frowned. ‘What’s his car doing here then? Parked the Rolls next to him this morning, thought the lazy bugger was in early for once!’

Meredith forced her mind not to flash back to yesterday and looked around the table at her colleagues. Both the Earl and his son, Sebastian, looked a bit the worse for wear, and she wondered if they had also continued drinking yesterday after the staff lunch. Could they have had anything to do with Ralph’s disappearance?

Neither of them lived in the house any longer, although Sebastian had grown up here. When he’d gone off to uni, to study whatever young aristocrats study at Cambridge, the Earl and his wife had moved to a stunning eight-bedroomed Georgian vicarage in Minstead Village. ‘Downsizing’, they’d called it, which Pete and Meredith thought was hilarious.

Once Sebastian had left uni – after the first two terms – he’d bought a round-the-world ticket and set off travelling – probably with his own Sherpas – for a couple of years. On his return he’d promptly been employed by his dad as Minstead House’s PR person. He was pleasant enough and well meaning, but absolutely rubbish at his job.

Meredith imagined the scandal that would ensue if yesterday’s events were made public, and cringed. It would affect everybody, quite apart from the devastating impact it would have on Paula.

Please come back, Ralph, she exhorted mentally. If she tried hard, she was able to believe that he might just walk in now, clutching his head.

The Earl rotated a finger in his bristly ear and Sebastian gazed out of the window while Ceri poured cups of coffee from a large cafetière. The head of HR, Maureen – a willowy redhead nicknamed Mumblin’ Mo because she spoke so low, so fast and in such a thick Scottish accent that nobody could understand her – was reading through the agenda with a look of barely concealed boredom.

The Earl called the meeting to order, and Ceri sat in Ralph’s empty chair to take minutes, pen poised over a new page in her notebook and an expression of ferocious concentration on her lined face. Whatever her failings as an executive PA were, she was a whiz at shorthand and tended to write down absolutely everything, which meant that the minutes always ran to dozens of pages.