Gavin shrugged, not totally indifferently. ‘I guess that could be cool. But are we going to look in the sub basement or what?’

Adrian suavely stepped to the side of the door, clowning like a dad at a children’s party. ‘After you, 007.’ Despite himself, he could hear the GoldenEye theme music in his head. He and Gavin were like secret agents, secret newsagents. No. That didn’t work. Secret agents of the news. Putting one over on their opponents’ empire just like plucky little Britain outwitting the Soviet Union.

They positioned themselves on either side of the door.

‘Ready?’ asked Adrian, resisting the urge to mime holding a Walther PPK.

‘Ready,’ said Gavin.

Adrian pressed down the handle and with a push sent the door swinging away from them. They peered inside. It was a dormitory.

‘Oh,’ said Adrian.

‘It’s not a basement at all.’

‘No.’

‘So where do we go now?’

‘Let’s just have a little poke around here first. Who knows what we might turn up?’

They went in, feeling for the first time that they were trespassing. There was little for them to see: bunk beds dressed with painfully orange linen, thin duvets corkscrewed around themselves by departed sleepers, the corners of sheets flapping from under their mattresses. The lower bunk directly in front of them, however, was tautly made and had beneath it a neat row of books – a biography of Lord Copper, The Principles of Rhetoric.

‘Brilliant!’ exclaimed Adrian. ‘Just brilliant. Look at that seriousness. I bet no one on the Echo’s reading about rhetoric.’

Gavin, tiring a little of all this, lifted a finger in pantomime of ‘Eureka!’ and said, ‘But maybe…’ He tiptoed over to the made bed and – with a cry of ‘Gotcha!’ – ripped back the duvet. Underneath was nothing but the orange sheet. He blew air out of his mouth. ‘Seriously, though, what are we even going to find in here? It’s not like they’ve actually got a missile silo; it’s all just people’s stuff.’

‘Well, whatever happens,’ Adrian had laid all this out in his head overnight, ‘in tomorrow’s edition we’ll have “World Exclusive: Inside the Daily Beast’s Secret Berkshire HQ”. No one’s going to walk past that without picking it up. Then beside it a picture of the police at the gate; that’ll be the front page, so that when you open the paper it’s like going inside. Then our report on what it’s like. Maybe that’s “spartan conditions”, “mass dormitories”, or maybe we find something more, some documents. Like maybe they’ve been given sensational instructions on what to do in an attack. Or they’ve written touching last letters to their families in case they’re killed. I don’t know, but we won’t know until we’ve looked around.’