The Editor’s blood leapt. ‘Do you hear that? That place needs to be fucking ransacked! They need their doors kicked in and those jihadi cunts dragged out by the hair. And you…’ He rounded on the policemen, one of whom was nervously re-sticking the Velcro holding his pistol to his thigh. ‘You can tell your colleagues that if any of them leak this story, that if any of those cunts so much as tells his cunt of a wife what he’s been doing at work, I will personally ring the home secretary and have him fucked every way I know how.’

The policemen murmured, and their officer talked at the Editor about precisely how he imagined this embedding of reporters would work. But Brython didn’t care. His heart was singing. He’d caught the exciting feral whiff of a story on the loose.

Brython watched two policemen, their submachine guns shifted on to their backs, join their hands into a step to help Ben climb over the fence. Less agile than Stephen and obstructed by a belly that had pulled his shirtfront out of his belt, he brought one knee up on to the top bar and wobbled, neither over nor not. The policemen raised their hands to soften a fall while Stephen gave advice from the other side. Swearing loudly, Ben swung his weight past the point of balance and dropped, loudly ripping the lining of his jacket and landing painfully on his hands and knees. The policemen followed easily. They pointed their guns’ noses deeper into the woods and the little group stalked towards Upper Bucklebury.

In the midst of all that had to be thought about and acted upon, the Editor was overcome by a sense of immanent destiny: his last hurrah would be magnificent. He realized now that there had been a slim cavil of disappointment about yesterday’s scoop: it had been handed to him for nothing. Now a story needed to be hunted and the hunters were off their leashes. He could hear bright bugles. He could feel fierce joy swelling in his chest. The last hurrah of print would be the Daily Beast running this story down: dramatic and exclusive pictures of the moment brave cops break jihadi cell in rural Berkshire; a scoop that would start, ‘The Daily Beast’s reporters were on the scene last night as…’

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