‘OK,’ she said. ‘Good.’ She hesitated, and then plunged in. ‘I’m really sorry about being in your seat. They asked me to cover while you were away and then, you know how it is, it’s not like they give you a choice. If you want it back, I don’t know, we could talk to them and see what they say. It’s not like we’re always in on the same days anyway, so on Thursday and Friday this week, for example, you’re rota’d in and I’m not, and I think the idea anyway was just to train me up a bit to have another person who could step in when they needed someone.’

Note, thought Jeremy with a sub’s specificity, that she doesn’t quite suggest giving me my seat back on days when we are both in. Which is most days. The others are just, what, a consolation prize? And this ‘they’ she’s been getting ordered about by, there is no ‘they’; it’s the chief.

But even as he was about to speak his mind he was asking himself what blame could be laid on her, or even on the chief. That was how it worked. Had he himself not, when only a little older than her, displaced the deputy editor of the Sentinel in much the same way? Actually, he was lucky he hadn’t been sacked. The man he’d replaced on the Sentinel, a member of the old guard called Mark Pont, had been. That was what usually happened to anyone whose cost suddenly outweighed his usefulness. Lauren would learn that herself one day. Perhaps she already was learning it. And, thinking like this, Jeremy talked himself out of his job.

To Lauren he said, ‘Oh don’t worry about it. Better you than me.’

‘Really?’ He could see her relief.

‘Yeah, really. I’d been saying to Frank that I’d had enough of it anyway, so…’

‘Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realize that.’

‘Course I don’t mind still doing the days when they’re short.’

‘I see,’ she said again. Everything about her relaxed. Her shoulders straightened. Breaking into a smile, she made a noise halfway between ‘Huh’ and ‘Ha’. ‘I thought—’ She shook her head. ‘I was worried you might be pissed off. You know, you slip out for a week and they just close up the gap.’ Her voice still held a question.

‘I wouldn’t put it past them,’ he said. ‘They’d shackle us to the desks if they could.’

‘As long as the leg irons were made in England.’

Jeremy’s chest lifted in a single guffaw. ‘Yeah, and then write a leader slamming the other papers for using foreign-bought shackles.’

‘Especially when hard-working British shackle-making families are struggling to pay their mortgages.’