The chief threw up his hands. ‘Fine. Go and talk to her, you mad bastard. Maybe she’ll snap you out of it. And hey, listen, I’ve got to find someone sharpish, so don’t think you can moon about and then say yes whenever you feel like it.’

Jeremy nodded at this and went down to the newsroom, where the reporters were already chugging coffee and rubbing their eyes. He deliberately didn’t check the TV screens for updates while he leant back in his seat and called Louise from his desk phone.

She said, ‘Hello?’ hesitantly, not recognizing the number and, as soon as he’d spoken and she began to talk, he wished he hadn’t called. He would have been able to speak to her if he’d got through last night, but now he didn’t want to talk to anyone. The pressure of what she had to say to him had apparently been building since he left home yesterday and he sat inert inside his clothes and his bulk while she belaboured him with words: there were soldiers at Kemsing station; how could he have said it wouldn’t be dangerous? They had to decide whether to take the girls out of school.

He didn’t want to decide about anything. He just wanted to do his drudgery in peace. Most of all, he wanted just to go back to sleep, preferably for a thousand years, and wake up when everyone and everything – Louise, Frank, the dead boy, the Beast, even his daughters – would be unable to bother him any further. A yearning gathered in him: to be buried far down below the surface of the earth, where no sound could reach him, where he would be utterly forgotten and would utterly forget himself, oblivious as a rock.

Now Louise was getting angry because he wasn’t answering her questions. ‘I don’t see why you don’t just leave and come home where it’s safe. It’s like you don’t want to.’

Stay, go, charter a car with Turkish Anna, walk out on the job he came to every day…

He glanced up at the screens projected on to the back wall: soldiers in camouflage clothes and blue latex gloves were searching through brown people’s suitcases at King’s Cross; a double line of riot police with helmets and shields pushed back a roiling Muslim crowd; a group of black-suited MPs knelt to read the messages on a glinting mound of cellophane-wrapped bouquets; forensics experts in white scrubs went busily in and out of what looked like a wedding marquee, from which protruded the smashed muzzle of the bus; and a squat green tank, its long barrel sniffing the air, reversed soundlessly into position next to a taxi rank at Heathrow.

‘Louise,’ he said. ‘If we give up, that means they’ve won. If we want to live in a free country, we’ve got to not give in.’