Not long afterwards, Dave finished his pint and didn’t ask for another. Adrian put his laptop in a cupboard in the kitchen for safe keeping. Gavin was woken up, tetchy and needing the loo. And then once they’d all had a quick but solemn nip of whisky on the house, and Adrian had shaken hands with everyone, the three intruders set off down the dark lane towards the chink that the chief had opened in the armour of the Beast.

Thursday

30

‘Wakey, wakey, sleeping Jezzy,’ whispered the chief from very close by, and Jeremy jerked into consciousness, his eyes popping open then squinting in the bleak overhead light. He swallowed and blinked, sliding towards the wall and away from the chief’s ogre-ish head. Everyone else in the dorm was still asleep. Wrapping the thin orange duvet more tightly around his bulbous torso, he mumbled, ‘It’s not time yet.’

‘Oh, but it is time, Rip van Jezzle. I’ve got a job just for you.’

Jeremy’s hangover was descending on him. He probed it like a painful tooth. It hurt. ‘Can’t you get the grunts to do it?’

The apparently un-resting, unrelenting chief displayed no trace of having recently been held in the humane softness of sleep. His striped blue shirt was fresh; his paisley tie kinked as ever where it met the bulge of his gut. It was as if last night’s bacchanal had never happened. If anything, he looked pleased with himself. ‘This one’s all yours, jammy old Jeremy, so get the fuck up.’

Jeremy rolled face-first on to the pillow and groaned into it. ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘Just let me have a shower first.’

‘Good lad. The block’s at the end of the corridor. Meet you back here in twenty minutes.’

‘What time is it now?’

‘Seven thirty.’

‘Oh, fucking hell, Frank. Half seven? Can’t I have another hour? What time did we even come inside last night?’

‘Twenty minutes, showered and shaved. Or those greedy reporters will have eaten all the breakfast.’

Although Jeremy was reasonably sure that the canteen wouldn’t let that happen, the suggestion did add an irritating anxiety to his hangover. He waved the chief away, so he wouldn’t see his vest and boxer shorts, and clumsily lowered himself down the stepladder.

In the shower’s heat and steam and noise, he supported himself with a hand splayed against the cool tile and let the water rush over his head and down his swollen belly. He wished it could spray straight into his skull and rinse it out like a mug. His throat burnt and his lips pinched: he’d smoked too much last night and he could feel the black fog sitting in his lungs like a gas in a jar. At least that slight disgust postponed the moment when he would have to find out whether it was possible to go outside and smoke today.