“Not if I climb on your shoulders,” Lindsay enthused. “Come on, over here.”

“You shouldn’t go in by yourself,” Sophie protested uselessly as Lindsay dragged Sophie over to the wall and started to scramble up her body, depositing sticky yellow mud on her clothes as she went.

Lindsay prized the window open and gripped the sill. “Why the hell not?” she gasped as she pulled herself up, nearly kicking Sophie in the head as she struggled for leverage. “We’re only talking one maverick journo here, not the Boston Strangler.”

As Lindsay hauled her upper body over the sill, Sophie recovered her breath and said, “Not necessarily. There is one other way Conference Chronicle could have known that Laura was in the right place at the right time to have been spotted by you and translated into prime suspect for Union Jack’s murder.” Lindsay’s legs suddenly stopped thrashing. “That’s right, sweetheart. Whoever writes Conference Chronicle might just be Union Jack’s real killer.”

Lindsay’s voice, muffled by her position, floated back to Sophie. “We just passed a fire exit. About twenty feet back. I’ll open it from the inside, okay?” She gave a final heave and pulled herself over the sill. There was an ominous crash, followed by, “Don’t worry, I’m all right, I just knocked some chairs over.”

Lindsay groped round in the dark till she found a door and emerged into the gloom of a corridor dimly lit by emergency lighting. Cautiously, she headed in the direction of the fire door she’d spotted from the outside. Praying it wasn’t alarmed, she pushed down on the bar and felt the door give. Sophie grabbed the edge and hauled it towards her, slipped inside then grabbed Lindsay in a tight hug. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said.

“I know, I know, you just didn’t want to miss the fun,” Lindsay mock-grumbled.

“I just like to keep you on your toes. What’s the plan of action?”

Lindsay shrugged. “I guess we just wander round till we find our rogue photocopier.”

Sophie ran a hand through Lindsay’s tousled hair. “That’s what I love about you, Gordon,” she said fondly. “Always first on the block with a clear strategy.”

They moved down the silent corridors, trying to keep quiet. On the ground floor, the conference hall occupied the central area of the building, surrounded by a corridor. The opposite side of the corridor was lined with different sized offices, like a motley ring of covered wagons. It was easy to eliminate them simply by walking the corridors; there were no strips of light showing under doors, no telltale humming and paper-shunting of photocopiers to be heard. It took less than fifteen minutes for Sophie and Lindsay to be certain that wherever Conference Chronicle was being produced, it wasn’t on the ground floor.