Jeremy wanted to ask why the chief was leaving, if he loved the Beast so much. But he asked nothing and, as they walked, looked around at this place where they’d arrived. The walls and floor were bare concrete, as if in a military base. Above their heads, the ceilings were low enough to touch and the glowing strip lights were encaged in wire. The walls had, however, been decorated with black-and-white photographs blown up to the size of news pages: a mountaineer in woollen clothes and circular goggles planted his foot on a snowy ridge, above the caption: ‘Daily Beast Yeti Expedition, Tibet 1956. Reporter Gary Wadeson makes tracks for Kangri Rinpoche’. Then Humphrey Bogart in an armchair reading a large-format Beast, pipe stem held casually in the corner of his mouth. The caption read, ‘“Bogey” enjoys his Daily Beast on the set of Casablanca, Hollywood 1942’, and the headline on the paper was ‘Rommel Stopped at Alamein’.

But today’s story, his story, was the equal of anything from this golden past. Jeremy glared at the creased flesh on the back of the chief’s head as he followed him around a corner into the fortified newsroom itself.

There was the same racket as in Kensington, but the newsroom was smaller and, like the corridor, constrained by a low ceiling, rough, blank, windowless walls and a poured-concrete floor. The furniture looked as if it had been there since the seventies; the desks metal, the chairs unpadded. But the computers were newish and there was the same crowded maze of desks, the same phones and talking and typing and the same TV channels fuzzily projected on to the wall behind the back bench. Jeremy was obscurely moved by this persistence of forms, until he noticed that the newsroom was uneasy and that groups of people were actually watching the screens.

All the channels were telling the same story with variations of the same images. The shot they kept coming back to was of a paper shop gutted by fire, with a blue-and-white line of plastic police tape fluttering in the foreground. Around the charred holes of a display window and a narrow door the brickwork was blackened, as if by an untidy child colouring outside the lines, and on the pavement beneath were feathery black flakes of burnt newspaper. The thick blue plastic Daily Beast awning had partially melted in the heat and the camera, with the newsman’s taste for symbol, kept returning to where the Beast’s white crest had warped and run.