2.15: It's a cocktail party, idiot!

Much to everyone’s surprise, as the top-secret meeting finishes, Lottie appears from nowhere and tugs at Alcock’s coat.

“You have to hold a cocktail party, obvs!”

As Alcock looks confused - both as to how Lottie has seamlessly joined the conversation after what was supposed to be a highly confidential committee meeting, but also what cocktail parties have to do with anything, and why does anyone ever say aloud the abbreviation ‘obvs’: it is so uncouth! - Lottie drags him over to the Potting Shed CD player and plays a sequence of radio adaptations of Paul Temple and Hercule Poirot mysteries, shushing him whenever he tries to interrupt to ask why.

Since each drama lasts several hours and there are many, many Paul Temple mysteries and quite a few Hercule Poirot cases, this takes a surprising time (days!). It is a mark of his patience that Alcock devotes so much time to the whims of an irritating teenager.

After several days, puzzling over the significance of boxes of matches, monogrammed hat-boxes, night club membership cards and worrying about cars being forced easily off the road into water at bridges and boats shot at - though with the only fatalities only ever being from the lower classes - Alcock suddenly realises the meaning of Lottie’s suggestion.

“You have to hold a cocktail party, obvs!”

To end this case, he needs to hold a cocktail party and, if he is to emulate Temple and Poirot, he must start by accusing people he knows full well to be innocent, for no very clear reason, only eventually, after nearly the whole half hour episode, accusing the real villain. And if Temple is to be believed, it is almost certain that the real villain will die in an obviously hare-brained escape attempt. While this prospect seems to excite Lottie, Alcock is less sure.

The Potting Shed is not tea-total, but it transpires that the drinks cupboard contains only some ginger wine left over from Christmas, half a bottle of Jägermeister which no one had liked and some sweet sherry. Alcock decides to go off script and hold his denouement at the pub. 

Following Paul Temple in another regard instead, he makes a trunk call to the Barman of the Swan Hotel (though it could more cheaply and just as easily have been a local call).