Then the door was flung open and from behind it broke Adrian, accelerating towards Anna and Jeremy. He was carrying a plastic chair in front of him as a fender. Anna snapped, snapped, snapped. Jeremy stood immobile, the useless video camera still in his hand, watching this neatly suited little man bear down on him in a state of what looked like exhilaration. As Adrian was almost upon them, he hurled the chair and began a shout – which went unheard because, as he opened his mouth, a shot rang out.

The metallic whip crack was so fast it almost caught up with its own echo and the reverberation in the contained space was so loud that the journalists’ hands twitched to their ears. An invisible force smacked into the left side of Adrian’s chest. It spun him off his feet and backwards, so the second shot struck him square on, just above the heart, knocking him irrecoverably to the floor.

The chair he’d thrown clattered into Anna and Jeremy. Anna clumsily blocked it with a forearm while still taking pictures. Jeremy felt the chair legs scrape across his arm and collide with the side of his paunch, but didn’t see them. In the instant of the shots, he’d been looking not at Adrian, nor even at the Editor, but at the wall behind him.

Across the fuzzy news channels had loomed the gargantuan black shadow of the Editor’s pistol. The sight induced in Jeremy the shock of vertigo, a reeling through time.

He staggered as the newsroom erupted around him. He saw the Editor and Geraldine running closer; saw Will leaning dazed against the printer; saw two trembling hands stretched out of the doorway in a gesture of surrender; heard Geraldine bawling, ‘Get him out here! Get him out here!’; and smelt something like scorched carpet.

And below all, on the floor, he saw the dead man. He was quite short, his brown hair cropped sensibly as it receded, his M&S suit dusty at the knees, his blue-checked shirt a little too casual for the Beast. The top button was done up and his tie patterned with tiny typewriters. His eyes rolled horribly part of the way back under their lids, which had fallen to different levels, like broken awnings. They did not flutter, nor stare, nor see, but were only balls of milky matter, thickening.

His arms were spatchcocked outwards as if he’d been miming a leap of joy when killed. But they didn’t match the nothing expression on his face. The parts had lost what made them cohere. Averting his eyes from Adrian’s chest, Jeremy saw that one of his trouser legs had ridden up; he saw the top of a forlorn school-type black sock, failing to cover the exposed, nearly hairless calf. Jeremy was ashamed to look at it.