While she spoke, the subs worked alert but calm, more concentrated and yet more detached than on a normal evening, with a kind of clean good hollowness like that after tears. And as night gathered around their bunker, just as it did, not so far away, around the living and the dying and the dead, they typed and trimmed and polished, categorizing the complex varieties of pain, disaster and wrongdoing into page lead and sidebar, spread and panel, headline, stand-first and picture caption.

Max revised Rosie’s story about Kayani’s English upbringing. Almost automatically he improved ‘Kayani, the youthful suspect who has become a figurehead for the gang’ to ‘Kayani, the gang’s baby-faced poster-boy’. He deleted her choice of pull-quote: ‘He was never in trouble in school’ and reverted to dummy copy – Thisisapullquotethisisapullqu – while he scanned the text. Then he wrote: ‘The middle-class boy who hated Britain’.

He glanced up when in his peripheral vision he noticed Geraldine jolt forward and say into the phone: ‘Is it Thames Valley or the Met? They should know this is part of the Met’s operation. There aren’t any reporters with them?… Wunderbar. There’s nothing on the wires yet either, so no one else will have so much as a whisper of it in their first edition. Make yourself useful to the coppers, point out the would-be hijackers and see if you can extract some quotes… Yes, yes, we already have people going to their doorsteps… Alright, don’t argue with them for now, is that all the names?… So that’s… sixteen, including the two hijackers. Is that right? Have you ticked off the bodies?… So the count’s at sixteen. By golly, what a splash!’

28

‘It’s in! The splash is in, Maxi darling,’ the chief shouted above the din of the newsroom. All around him, his colleagues were flying through their work. Their words formed themselves as quickly as they could type; their eyes were keen, their judgement certain, their hands swift and steady.

Even with less than half an hour to edition, Max did not simply bounce the splash copy onwards to Jez, but snatched a clear moment to sieve it through his mind. One reporter had written the top while another had started halfway down – and both were still filing paragraphs as they finished them. They’d adopted the Beast’s highest-flown register: ‘innocent lives catastrophically interrupted’, ‘the fatal momentum of mistrust’ and ‘outbreaks of violence the length and breadth of England’.

They had a quote from a survivor of the bus’s plunge: ‘I didn’t even see the hijacking; it was all so fast.’ And their source, too, was still alive: ‘They were suspicious; I knew it when they sat down. I told myself I was just being paranoid, but I wish I’d called earlier.’

Max said, ‘Jez, the splash is yours. More pars coming as they’re written. Where are you with the Dramatic Shootout and the Interrogation story?’