Arthur explained how he’d expected, on entering the house, to hear the sound of the piano. It was eleven o’clock and at eleven o’clock his wife’s piano teacher arrived and stayed till noon, when Arthur came home for lunch and a nap. But the house was quiet, there was no steady beating of fans, the only sound the movement of a broom across the tiles somewhere towards the back of the house or out in the garden. ‘Alice?’ he called but there was no reply, only the silence of the fans and the distant scraping of the broom. He took off his hat and moved on through the house into the large parlour where his wife’s piano stood. ‘The lid was open, her music was on the stand. The only thing missing was Alice.’

The Queen nodded. ‘Continue, Mr. Pritt.’

Arthur swallowed, his throat felt tight. His robes were hot and heavy. He paused, as if suddenly aware of the strangeness of his situation, but like Macbeth he seemed to have gone on too far now to retreat.

He’d looked into the morning room, he said, where Alice did her reading and planned her menus and wrote her letters and took her sewing but she wasn’t there either.

The Queen seemed to be holding her breath, as if she knew now what was coming. Arthur paused, as he always did when he replayed everything in his own mind, picturing himself in his pale linen suit, a frightened sweating figure who seemed to understand by now that his life was coming to some sort of end.

At their bedroom door, he’d stopped. Beyond it he could hear the soft sounds of his wife’s pleasure and when he’d bent down and looked in through the keyhole he’d seen her with her head thrown back, a look on her face he’d never seen before; a tangle of flushed white limbs; Miss Gordon, the piano teacher.

One fat hand had flown to the Queen’s throat; her pouchy eyes were wide with wonder, as if Arthur had just pulled back a heavy curtain and revealed to her a unicorn, or a talking mirror, or proof of some other astonishing legend.

‘Good heavens, Mr Pritt,’ she whispered.