And not just the self-belief, but the bullishness. The two newspapers in the building that were not part of the Daily Beast Administrative Trust – the Impartial, which reported mainly on conflicts in the Middle East, and the London Trumpet, which reported mainly on parties in Mayfair – were permitted no visible sign of their presence. That applied most blatantly in the new ‘Editors’ Hallway’, a Doric arcade in smooth Italian marble that led – because there was nowhere else for it to go – from the canteen to the service lifts. Inside it hung the black-and-white portraits of every man who’d achieved the highest rank on his paper: Editor of the Daily Beast, the Beast on Sunday or BeastOnline.

When the arcade was opened, the current Editor’s portrait photo had attracted sightseers from every floor of the building. By some complex system of grimaces and contortions, he’d succeeded in twisting his features into the perfect semblance of a light-hearted, affable grin. Only a man with his keen sense of posterity would have put himself through it.

Underneath Jeremy’s deep reluctance to return to work, under the slow despair engendered by years of every day doing things that he didn’t want to do, he had, in some peculiar way, missed being here, as someone moving away from a railway line misses the clanking of the trains. But even the atrium and the arcade were only outworks of what was upstairs, the Beast’s most sacred citadel.

He took the glass lift up the side of the atrium, rising above his Lordship; above the pools where the carp’s stubby snouts breached the surface to engulf spiders that had fallen from the ceiling; above the raked-gravel Zen gardens where the reporters made their phone calls, and the terraced cafe-bar where they did their scheming, and finally arrived at the outer edges of the organ from which the Beast’s bellow issued forth: the newsroom.

He pulled open the glass door and heard the relentless sound of a thousand fingers rattling across their keyboards. These belonged to the rows of exhausted twenty-five-year-olds who wrote BeastOnline. They were kept in a battery of ten desks with the most senior furthest from the door through which Jeremy had entered. On one side they had a bank of windows on to the atrium; on the other was a wall of filing cabinets and a narrow passageway. As Jeremy walked along it he watched the fever with which they gobbled whatever scraps of information they could, trying to keep up the unrelenting pace that the Beast’s website required: ‘Whinging mass murderer hunger strikes for PlayStation’ – ‘Is overpopulated Britain on the brink of CANNIBALISM?’ – ‘You’re fired! ISIS executes downed pilot with flamethrower.’