He listened in, but couldn’t understand what they were saying. They continued to talk. And as he watched them, the shock receded. He told himself he was being paranoid, his perceptions warped by too many years of news. They were doubtless just two perfectly ordinary Muslim women dressed in burqas. Bombs and terrorists might appear in some places, but what he saw before him was the entrance to the paper’s offices after a week off, spent with his wife in Dublin. He’d felt almost free over there, without his daughters or any obligation to work; and, even though Louise had made him carry their passports everywhere in a scratchy security belt, he’d been lifted by a certain lightness that was still with him.

Implicit beyond the entrance was his mind’s habitual setting: the shift pattern and the late finish; the print deadline and the pension plan; the front bench and the back bench; the commute and the catchment area. Jeremy decided to think no more about terrorists, and pressed the stub of his cigarette into the soil of the raised flowerbed beside him. Then looked at the rotating doors. On every panel was stamped ‘Cardholders Only’. His card was in his pocket.

But he’d still not fully shaken off the feeling of disorientation, and to settle he addressed himself by his secret nickname, which he’d not told even his wife or his closest colleague and friend, Max. He spoke to himself in a needling but encouraging tone, the way he imagined a public-school games master might address a hopelessly un-athletic child. ‘Come on, Drudge. Come on, Drudgy. One foot after the other. Card out, through the door, up the escalator. You can manage that, can’t you?’

And up he went.

2

The escalator carried him at a stately pace up to the vast, sun-flooded atrium, six storeys high, and deposited him full in the marble glare of Lord Copper. His glory was magnified by two tall black-backed waterfalls that slid silently past him on either side, and by the gold letters inlaid above him in elegant Roman type: Copper House. In front of him, facing each other, stood an honour guard of six more busts on slim pedestals, lesser viscounts and founders, their heads set two feet lower than the great man’s. And down this avenue Lord Copper stared in undimmed fervour at all those who entered.

Jeremy gave him a nod of recognition. Despite everything, the tired old charger in his chest did still paw the ground as he came once more into this last confident stronghold of the Press. How could it not, when it felt the sheer self-belief of a paper that built in marble, that commissioned busts, that constructed waterfalls and imported carp to patrol their lower pools in seamless tessellations of red and gold?