‘Yes. OK. I’m going.’ The muscles in his arms and legs shivered. An urge to lie down dragged at him, to somehow get down on to the untouched grass and fall asleep on it. He looked down into the bus and then lowered himself inside.

Thinking he must not faint, he must not faint, or he would fall on to them, he climbed down the seats until his feet were beneath the aisle. The seatback he was standing on had been snapped like the man’s teeth. There was no movement from the jumbled limbs below him, but from all around came sobs and voices and a smell that clogged his throat and made his diaphragm heave. He could see the sky above him, but did not climb back up to it. He manoeuvred himself until he could kneel in the wrecked aisle and reach down to the bodies.

He touched the fold of burqa nearest him and snatched his hand away wet. Warm blood had seeped through it. His hand began to shake, but he reached again and, quickly, before he could feel anything, pulled back the first black hood.

*

A few seconds later, in the newsroom, Geraldine cried, ‘Dead! The terrorists are both dead!’ And the newsroom exploded in relief. Sheer, plain relief swept away their unanswered questions about precisely who and what had been involved. The journalists whooped and raised their fists and shouted, ‘Come on!’ The Beast had struck back. Will banged his desk. Max and Jeremy nodded to each other with deep understatement. Turkish Anna mimed a penis cumming into the air. Geraldine, her floral-patterned mobile held between ear and shoulder as she haphazardly banged all that Ken said into the computer, sang out again, ‘They’re girls! My giddy aunt, if they’re involved with the others we might be on to a sort of jihadi Bonnie and Clyde. But with two Bonnies! Now chop-chop, Ken, come along – open their handbags and see if you can find their names; we’re right on deadline.’

The Editor, with the unhindered speed of someone who now had only one course of action, had called for paper and was standing at the slanted Art desk, redrawing the pages. As the flashing pencil sliced clean lines across the sheets, he said: ‘The splash will lead on the bus then go into the woman in Leicester – one story; a bus picture on the front – turning straight to two–three, where we have the burqa picture. All the other burqa spreads go one spread back. We’re having five clear terror spreads now. Pages two–three-in-exile go on to twelve–thirteen with weather and lottery. On three we want information on the victims. Geraldine, Anna, we need names, ages, pictures in happier times, human details.