To Gavin it seemed unlikely, but nevertheless he Googled ‘Shear Bliss Thatcham’. While the phone was ringing, Adrian started to talk again about how this could be the turning point in the Echo’s fortunes that he’d long predicted. It was all Gavin had heard all morning and he was glad to cut Adrian off with a gesture; someone at the hairdresser’s had picked up.

*

Inside the belt of trees tied loosely around the bunker, Jeremy lowered a foot from the bus to the tarmac and then let his weight follow it. Back in the open air, he took the opportunity to light a cigarette. In front of him a row of buses gleamed in the sunshine and beyond them squatted the lair where the Beast had gone to ground. It was a low, wide, boxy, concrete building that could have been a school, except that there were no windows. Apprehensive policemen patrolled it, their wrists cocked high on their submachine guns. Outside the wide, single-panel door, like that to a vault, an officer-grade policeman with a pair of assistants was checking the subs’ ID cards against a list.

Jeremy followed a general movement towards the building, trundling his wheelie suitcase behind him. Everyone seemed oppressed by the sight of all these policemen and by their anxiousness. Jeremy walked slowly, still thinking about what he’d heard. That the chief was leaving, that he could leave, shocked him. The chief had lived on the Beast’s back so long he’d grown into it like some malevolent parasite. The idea that even he’d lost his belief in it – in the middle of a story like this – and that he now wanted to go out quietly… It raised Jeremy’s fears about his own future from their shallow sleep.

But he reacted to them with a kind of indignation. It felt almost treasonous of the chief to be defeatist when Jeremy’s story was commanding the whole world’s attention, and he wondered briefly whether the chief was just afraid. How could anyone imagine that the Beast was in decline when the prime minister had convened COBRA, the Met was turning out in force and the story was getting blanket coverage on every channel, every website, every Twitter feed?

‘Hoy, dreamboat!’ The chief was hailing him. He was standing beside the policemen at the door and shouting, ‘Quick sharp! Get your name checked off or you’ll have to sleep outside where the jihadis can get you.’ The ranking policeman shot him an irritated glance that only sharpened the chief’s appetite for provocation. ‘Hup hup, get inside where it’s nice and safe before one of those lone wolves starts spraying bullets at the entrance. We don’t want you to get left outside with the cops.’