The chief knew that the Editor disapproved of all this, though not enough to interfere in the culture of the barracks, and he himself was attached to these memorials to subs and blunders past. He knew that Jez wanted to talk about Lauren taking his place. Lauren might not be up to it but, if she was, he would have two trained middle-bench subs where before he’d only had one. And it was no bad thing to keep the rabble hungry. He took a hard-nibbed pencil from his pocket and moved a few more people around the rota in clear capital letters.

He came back over to Max, who tried to read in his expression any clue about the rumour he’d heard in the Lord Wellington: that the chief was leaving. The rumour said he was going to work for the Brute, but that couldn’t be true. The Brute’s circulation was collapsing. Their whole paper was now just dressed-up wire stories and ‘my secret shame’ by footballers’ ex-girlfriends. And neither the footballers nor the shameful secrets were even any good. The revelation that the former squeeze of a Swansea goalkeeper had slept with the manager? It was a long way from ‘I pissed on Pelé’. The affectionate old insult that the Brute was nasty, Brutish and shit didn’t even apply any more; now it really was just shit.

No, you would have to be an idiot to join the Brute. And Frank, even though his headlines were all fist and no velvet, had never lacked subtlety when it came to his own interests. But if Frank did go somewhere, the next in the hierarchy was… Max. He studied the chief’s face. The bastard was, as always, boisterously full of himself. There was no sign to read. Max detested him.

The chief raised his flabby chin in the direction of Jeremy. He was sitting beside Colin at Newsdesk, leaning forward to prop his cheek on his palm and watch what Colin was writing down. The chief correctly distrusted Max as a pretender to his seat, but chatted anyway: ‘Probably nothing to it. Just Jez hallucinating with joy at being back.’

‘No, probably not. But if there is—’

‘The thing to find out would be what they were doing here.’

‘Terror attack on Beast HQ.’

‘Now that would be a splash worth coming to work for.’

‘The biggest story for years. Could only be better if they did blow part of the place up.’

The chief was amused. ‘And even Newsdesk couldn’t fuck up the body count if the victims were on the floor right in front of them. Plus with any luck you’d get a bit of shrapnel right in the brain stem and wouldn’t have to worry about it.’