He should leave it to Lauren to deal with and see how much she liked being on the middle bench then. He glanced up at her. All he could see was the back of her head, the thick, mottled blonde hair sitting on it like a wig. She seemed focused on the screen in front of her, concentrating on the work as you do when you’ve just been promoted.

His own work was sitting undiminished in front of him. Alright, he said to himself. Come on, Drudgy, let’s do some subbing. Come on, Drudge of Drudge Hall. Come on, at least you’re not young. Then you’d have another thirty years of this.

He began to put some things in order. They certainly couldn’t call her ‘peppy’ in the third par. And he was a bit unsure about the phrase ‘The schoolgirl died when a car…’ It seemed too stark. He put in a ‘sadly’: ‘The schoolgirl sadly died when…’

The intro, as usual, would have to be rewritten. Reporters didn’t understand that the Beast did not sensationalize. Its base note was deep earnestness, the tone of the newsreader. It was just that the world it reported on was, unfortunately, often sensational.

He worked, his mind sometimes flicking through its other channels, and around him the other subs did the same. Each man’s thoughts landed on his story and lifted again, like a nation of bees. Meanwhile, their bodies sat in their chairs. Their pupils flickered. Their fingers twitched. Sometimes they unconsciously rubbed the ache in their forearms.

Fragment by fragment, tile by tile, Jeremy got it done, until only the headline remained. He clicked his cursor into the text box and pressed Ctrl+A to select all the dummy copy. It used to say:

HEADLINE IN HERE

PLEASE HEADLINE

IN HERE PLEASE

But since the minister for culture, media and sport had proposed independent regulation of the Press the dummy copy at the top of every story read:

CAROL CRAWLEY IN

HERE PLEASE GET

CAROL CRAWLEY IN

He deleted it and wrote:

FAMILY’S ANGUISH

AS SCHOOLGIRL KILLED

IN TRAGIC FALL

Didn’t fit at all. And really he needed to get horses in there somewhere.

FAMILY AGONY AS

HORSE-LOVING GIRL

KILLED IN TRAGIC FALL

Horse-loving. The newsroom was so saturated with ribaldry it was hard to tell whether the readers would hear the same innuendo.

FAMILY ANGUISH

AS KEEN RIDER, 15,

DIES IN TRAGIC FALL

He could squeeze in that comma and that extra l; but, on reflection, ‘fall’ wasn’t enough. He had to get in that there had been some kind of coming together with a car. Otherwise it would sound as if she’d just lost her grip. And he wondered for a moment about ‘keen rider’. It was fine. No one else would be thinking of ‘horse-loving’.

FAMILY AGONY AS

KEEN RIDER KILLED

IN