He stood beside Jeremy and they both cast their eyes about the page. Jeremy had zoomed out enough to fit the whole story on his screen. The copy became a blurred approximation, apart from the first paragraph, which could still be made out along with the other important elements: headline, quote, photograph of the dead girl in her school uniform.

‘Not bad, is she?’ said the chief. ‘You definitely would, wouldn’t you, Jezza, you dirty dog.’

Jeremy said: ‘She’s backlit, though, in this shot. Probably makes her look prettier than she is. But yeah, not bad-looking at all.’

‘She won’t be as pretty now. Just a pint-sized corpse lying down there in all that lovely peace and quiet, thinking, “Thank God I’m dead and don’t have middle-aged pervs like that Jezza Underwood leering at me any more.” Lucky bitch. But listen, look in standby. Turkish Anna has put another Tragic Schoolgirl in there. Apparently we’ve got a glut of swishy-haired corpses today. There’s a whole stack of ugly ones she hasn’t even put through. This one got choked by her abseil rope.’

Jeremy flicked back to PagePlanner, feeling, as ever, bombarded by the chief. In standby there was a picture of another pretty young schoolgirl, this one wearing a navy jumpsuit and a red helmet, making a trout-pout with two other girls, their faces pressed against each other for the camera.

The chief put his fleshy hands on the desk and leant forward on to them, assessing the picture. ‘Taken literally ten minutes before it happened. Got tangled in the rope somehow. She’s prettier than the horse girl, isn’t she? And we can definitely get a better headline out of it.’

Max, who’d been listening in, quick-fired: ‘Strangled up in blue.’

The three of them, and Will, laughed. Rosie looked harder at her screen.

The chief said, ‘OK, drop the horse girl; put this one in instead.’

Jeremy didn’t want to have to do all the work again. ‘But the other one’s really middle class. She’s got a horse. Maybe we could get a picture of it.’

The chief, who precisely understood his reluctance, gave him a look of pantomimic disbelief, and said, ‘This one’s fucking abseiling. Is that what they do on the sink estates where you live?’

Jeremy, despite knowing it was ridiculous, was slightly annoyed by the suggestion. ‘There are no sink estates where I live.’

‘And have your kids gone abseiling?’

‘Yeah. One of them.’

‘Exactly. The sink-estate kids aren’t abseiling; they’re shanking their pals and raping each other’s sisters. So boot out the horse girl. It’s not even that tragic, is it, that she can’t stay on a horse? Not so much tragic as just shit at horse riding.’