Mian, inside the car, moved in a way he shouldn’t have and one of the guns spoke a sharp percussive pop. In the same instant, many more followed and the car’s windshield burst into a shower of shatterproof glass. Choudry had turned to flee back into the house and the bullets caught him in the side, knocking him off his feet and over a waist-high iron gate.

A group of Kemnay’s men leapt past him towards the front door and from inside came a crunch and shrieks as more policemen smashed in through the back. The front door was flung open and Kemnay flinched, but it was only a pudgy old woman in house clothes with a thick grey plait falling over her shoulder. Kemnay tried to make out what the men inside were saying over the radio, but all he could hear was her starting to howl.

///////////////////////////

Max had hung his jacket and shirts from one end of the bed and beneath it he was laying out a neat row of shower gel, hair gel, shaving foam, upright toothpaste. Beside these was a stack of books: the authorized biography of Lord Copper; an investigative journalist’s account of the phone-hacking scandal; The Principles of Rhetoric.

Jeremy hoisted his bag up on to the bunk. On the bare wall beside it was another framed photograph: a young pilot with his goggles perched up on his leather flying cap, grinning as he rested one hand on the wing of a Spitfire. The caption read, ‘Wing Commander Peter Murray with his machine, Spitfire MH342, built by subscription from readers of the Daily Beast. Lost in action 16 June 1942. In memory of The Few.’

He silently climbed the short ladder to his bunk, then twisted awkwardly and sat down next to the pillow. ‘Burn the Beast’. And a man already burnt alive. He recoiled from that thought and, taking the cigarette carton from his coat pocket, began turning it in his hand. And the chief was leaving. Maybe it was time to get out.

But that thought opened up in him a kind of despair. On the monthly transfer from the Beast depended the mortgage, the catchment area, the girls’ schooling. If they had to move somewhere cheaper, the schools would get worse and would probably be no better than his own. And that would mean that the Underwoods weren’t engaged in a generation-by-generation ascent to ever greater ease and leisure and sophistication, but just flailing, scrabbling, writhing vainly in the mud.