‘That night, once the reactions of the victims’ families had been incorporated into the second edition, along with the news that a seventeenth victim, Nicola Dillon, had died in an ambulance on the way to hospital, and once some immediate details from the police raids on the Rouhani and Thorpe houses had been incorporated into the third, and the paper finally put to bed, the Beast’s staff celebrated. With the reckless confidence that came from having withstood to victory, they persuaded the chief to take hold of the heavy circular handle sealing the door to the outside, and unseal it. They filled the narrow corridor behind him, a shifting, agitated mass, giggling and hushing each other as he turned the smooth mechanism hand over hand. Invisible steel rods withdrew from their tubes in the opposite wall and the big door cracked open on a soundless hinge.

The chief swung the door inwards on its pivot, walking backwards, and waved the horde past him, cackling, ‘Fly, my pretties, fly!’ They shuffled through and, once past the bottleneck, sprayed into the soft outside air. The floodlighting on the tarmac tapered their shadows into long thin streaks and they waved their arms as they crossed it before slipping under the trees into velvety, welcoming darkness.

The living woods around them breathed out the scents of bark, sap, moss and mulch, moist soil turned by feet and the sweetness expelled by flowers as they closed. As Rosie swaggered beside Will, they sucked up the summer-night feeling of warmth after dark and, when she stumbled over a root, she grabbed his arm not at all accidentally.

The Beast’s staff set up in a spot where the susurrant canopy above them gave way and the stars dangled just out of reach like heavy fruit. White moonlight fell across the top of the clearing, illumining the trunks on one side and cutting across the journalists’ shoulders as they moved in and out of it. Someone had brought a surprisingly loud iPod speaker loaded with fifties rock ‘n’ roll and Features had contributed a motley collection of drinks they’d discovered inside one of the storerooms: bottles of brandy, vermouth and Campari whose faded labels carried outdated designs.

Rosie swigged from a spherical bottle of Chambord and talked over Will. She wanted to talk, to talk and talk, to let run free the words and thoughts leaping lightly out of her. She wanted to drink more and have more of everything – more cigarettes, more brandy – and to tell again the story of how she’d punched her way through to deadline. When she told the part where the reporter blithely, maddeningly, said, ‘Maybe someone different tipped them off,’ she laughed with the heartiness of someone who’d come unscathed from a brawl.