Jackson had gone to town. The headlines were big and black and there was a centrefold of nothing but pictures. One was of Jackson himself. He had a black eye. The front page asked a question in 120-point capitals – ‘MARTIAL LAW?’ – and below it was a picture of a soldier behind a machine-gun. Other pictures showed policemen charging beneath the unequivocal headline ‘POLICE BRUTALITY’.

I turned to the editorial, which said, in the measured prose peculiar to leader writers, that this time the government had gone too far, that there was no necessity for the death of fourteen Campanillan citizens and the maiming of dozens of others, and that the disturbance – a justifiable outburst of the people’s rage against a wicked government – could have been contained without the bloodshed of a police riot.

It seemed that Hosmer’s gag on Jackson had slipped. Up to the time of Salton’s death the Chronicle had been the organ of the Liberal Party, which was natural enough since Salton led the Liberals and owned the Chronicle. Since his death it had been curiously non-committal – the result, I assumed, of Hosmer’s gag. But there was nothing non-committal about this coverage of last night’s events.

I said, ‘Jackson seems to have changed his tune.’

Negrini grinned. ‘When the editor is given a black eye by a cop, you can’t expect him to be on the cop’s side. But there’s more to it than that. Jill told me last night that she’d ordered Jackson to pull out all the stops, to go for the police and Conyers. Did you have anything to do with that?’

I put down my coffee cup. ‘I might have done. I showed her that Conyers couldn’t deliver on the promises he’d made to her.’

‘She isn’t as interested in the political side as David was,’ said Negrini. ‘But something must have made her mad last night. Even with a black eye Jackson wasn’t too enthusiastic about going along with her, apparently. Until she threatened to fire him on the spot.’

I smiled. So that was why he’d spat out the gag. And once he’d done that, once he knew he had the support of his employer, there would be other consequences. Nothing I’d seen so far suggested that Jackson wasn’t actually a decent journalist, so the next step would follow logically. I guessed he’d already sent a cable to the Sunday Times in London, alerting them to the fact that there was more to the rioting on Campanilla than met the foreign eye. Within two days, the Insight team would be probing into the situation. There was nothing Conyers could do about it, except declare journalists personae non gratae – and that would shout to the world that there was something rotten in the state of Campanilla.