That the jihadi reinforcements were still far away slightly reassured the newsroom. But the bus and the deadline still came unceasingly closer and the nightly adrenaline flowed fast. It was becoming hard to concentrate. Anna muttered curses as she worked. Will’s mind kept losing its hold on the letters displayed by his screen. Every few seconds he looked up, looked around, lost his place, forgot what he’d been reading and checked the screens projected behind the back bench, half-expecting to see footage of the jihadis arriving at the building he was in. They hadn’t got off when the bus stopped in Birmingham, not even to go to the toilet or stretch their legs. It still hadn’t been confirmed that they were jihadis, but that didn’t seem like a good sign.

Jeremy was speaking in his head, saying, come on, super-sub. Come on, Jihadi Jez. Keep your fingers moving. Crunch down that par. Run those two sentences together. Woodward and Bernstein would have got the paper out.

Max was settling into himself, becoming still, while the chief became ostentatiously unfazed. As he came to give them copy, he flicked a print-off on to Jeremy’s desk, saying, ‘Pass that around, darling, but it’s probably better if you don’t let the Editor catch you with it.’ He carried on to Max: ‘And for you, Sub-Editor Barbie, the dramatic account of the other terrorists getting shot is in.’

The print-off was a gargoyle-ish caricature of the Prophet Muhammad drawn by the paper’s cartoonist. Muhammad had dropped a dildo-shaped time bomb and was wincing as he was painfully sodomized by Charles Brython. The caption read, ‘Fuck you, too, Muhammad!’

The joke couldn’t get through to Jeremy and he held the picture as if it were incomprehensible. The chief said, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the old pervert really did take it up the shitter. You know he got himself married to a nine-year-old. If he was alive now, we’d have had him banged up for being a paedo.’

But before he could demonstrate his fearlessness any further, the Editor returned. Jeremy flipped the picture upside- down and put it under his keyboard. Every reporter, every sub, every section editor and graphics man and picture researcher watched the Editor pace across to Anna’s desk and order Geraldine to join him. He said, ‘Anna, any change on the bus?’

‘Nope. They’re still trundling along towards us.’

‘So they won’t be here in time for edition. Geraldine, what else do we have for the front page?’

‘Actually,’ Anna interrupted, ‘we’ve just got something else in. From a snapper in Leicester.’