‘Shootout is in… now. Interrogation just needs a couple of lines taken out of it.’

‘But other than that it’s ready to go?’

‘All done.’

‘I’ll trim the fat then. You put it down and get into the splash.’

The layout kept shifting as Jeremy worked on the copy, the page reloading itself with slow computerized blinks every time Art desk displaced its columns. Photographs of the dead, cropped neatly square, were dropping into a four-by-four grid. To vary the design, the first box had been turned over to caption copy and the picture of that victim – Gary Connolly, twelve, of Bolton – had been enlarged to the same size as the grid and put alongside it. A pale, red-haired little boy, he was twisting away in disgusted glee as the young copper-and-cream spaniel he was holding tried to lick his face.

The Editor was striding towards them, his quarterdeck voice ringing out: ‘News editors! Caraway, Gross, Feldstein, Murray, Thwaite, Enderling! How is it possible that no one has thought to write a splash headline?’

As the senior editors hurried to gather behind Max, the paper’s South African lawyer unwillingly propelled himself once more into the ruckus. His sweat-slicked yellow hair stuck out from one side of his head, his twitching eye was squeezed shut and he was clutching a printout of all the Terror copy, on which he’d highlighted sentence after sentence in minatory orange. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, opening his eye long enough for it to spasm. ‘Charles?’

The Editor glared down at him. ‘What is it?’

Splaying his fingers across the uppermost sheet and forcing himself not to gabble, the lawyer said: ‘I’m just very concerned. First of all, in the splash, we’re calling these two women – um, Farhana Rouhani and Begum Thorpe – terrorists, and accusing them of either deliberately crashing the bus or causing a fatal accident, but what evidence have we got to stand that up? I’m looking through the copy, but other than an assertion from—’

‘Haven’t you been taught the first principles of the law? They’re dead, and you can’t libel the dead. How on earth have you managed to keep a job on a national newspaper without even knowing that?’

‘Yes, but it just takes one person to complain to IPSO about irresponsible—’

‘One person? Can you comprehend how many people are going to read this newspaper tomorrow?’

The chief was calling out, ‘Thirty-one, V-one, thirty-one is away!’ Max spoke to his pod: ‘Will, in Cops with Guns, he says he’s twice had to pull the trigger in the line of duty. Is that two shots in one incident or two incidents with an unspecified number of shots?’

Will spoke without ceasing to type. ‘Two incidents. An armed robbery and then a suicidal City worker.’

‘Good. Rosie, where’s the Terror Hunt?’

‘There’s something wrong with the times. It doesn’t make sense.’