The Bursar riffled desperately through his limited repertoire of small talk relating to women. He leaned down to Windle's gnarled ear.

"Isn't there rather a lot of, " he struck out aimlessly, "washing things? And making beds and cookery and all that sort of thing?"

"Not in the kind of, mm, life I have in mind," said Windle firmly.

The Bursar shut his mouth. The Archchancellor banged on a table with a spoon.

"Brothers -' he began, when there was something approaching silence. This prompted a loud and ragged chorus of cheering.

"- As you all know we are here tonight to mark the, ah, retirement" - nervous laughter – "‘of our old friend and colleague Windle Poons. You know, seeing old Windle sitting here tonight puts me in mind, as luck would have it, of the story of the cow with three wooden legs. It appears that there was this cow, and -"

The Bursar let his mind wander. He knew the story.

The Archchancellor always mucked up the punch line, and in any case he had other things on his mind.

He kept looking back at the little table.

The Bursar was a kindly if nervous soul, and quite enjoyed his job. Apart from anything else, no other wizard wanted it. Lots of wizards wanted to be Archchancellor, for example, or the head of one of the eight orders of magic, but practically no wizards wanted to spend lots of time in an office shuffling bits of paper and doing sums. All the paperwork of the University tended to accumulate in the Bursar's office, which meant that he went to bed tired at nights but at least slept soundly and didn't have to check very hard for unexpected scorpions in his night-shirt.

Killing off a wizard of a higher grade was a recognised way of getting advancement in the orders.

However, the only person likely to want to kill the Bursar was someone else who derived a quiet pleasure from columns of numbers, all neatly arranged, and people like that don't often go in for murder.