It was grimly appropriate that thirteen should sit down to dine on the night John Coleby ate his last meal on earth. But it was Coleby himself who had arranged the details of that dinner party. Even the name cards, set carefully to indicate the chair of each guest, took the form of tiny skulls mounted on slender ebony pedestals, and the white lilies in the centrepiece gave a funereal air to what surely was intended as a festive board. A grim joke with a grimmer ending!