‘Oh, a bit,’ said Will. ‘He did the journalism master’s at City, didn’t he? Were you on that too?’

‘No, I went straight on to the trainee scheme here. But if I hadn’t got a place I would have done a master’s and then tried some other way.’

‘When I started,’ said Jeremy. ‘No one did any kind of training to be a journalist. I’m from the first generation where it started to be normal even to have a degree. And the Brute’s second-last editor, Myles Crawford, started on the Newsdesk at sixteen; that wouldn’t happen now.’ Actually, he’d come over from Ireland, Crawford, from the Evening Telegraph in Dublin. Jeremy wished he’d never heard of the place.

To Will, being told the oral history of newspapers always felt like an induction. He asked, ‘But you didn’t do that?’

‘No, I got a degree and then started as a cub reporter on the Margate Sentinel, and worked my way up to editor before I came to the middle bench here.’

‘How come you’re not in conference today? Don’t all the pod leaders go?’

He noticed that Rosie shifted in her seat and absented herself from the conversation, appearing to examine what was on her screen.

‘Because I’m taking a break from the middle bench today. Lauren’s doing it.’ And before Will could ask him anything, he said: ‘The idea is to let you whippersnappers have a go at the middle-bench jobs, so the paper won’t collapse when we retire.’

‘Really?’ said Will, forgetting all about Rosie. ‘And how did Lauren end up being the one doing it?’

‘Well, she’s been here a few years; she knows what she’s doing.’

Will turned this over in his mind. Yes, she did seem securely embedded. He’d heard her call reporters ‘a bunch of fucking primadonnas’ and she had an immediate certainty about the Beast’s voice, as well as the tired eyes and irritability of someone who’d given many hours to ventriloquizing it. He asked: ‘Did she apply, or how did it work?’

Jeremy leant all the way back in his chair, as if it were nothing to him. ‘I don’t know. I suppose she let the chief know she’d like to give it a try and then when I went to Ireland there was an opportunity and he asked her. Pretty straightforward.’