If the chief caught the subtext about the rumour he was leaving, he didn’t show it. ‘I’ll never be allowed to leave,’ he declared. ‘I sold my soul to the Beast for magical headline-writing powers and to pay for it I’ve been damned eternally to the newsroom. They all used to cry, though – do you remember? – when the department was bigger and they had further to walk.’

‘Yes,’ said Jeremy, strangely moved. ‘I remember. With that long room where all the layout subs used to sit, and they used to make a tunnel, everyone banging metal rulers. Even Clive blubbed and he was the meanest bastard I ever worked with.’

‘Great journalist, though,’ said Max.

‘Speaking of which,’ said the chief, ‘enough fannying about. He’s had his two minutes and now he’s dead to us. So shove a tampon up your nostalgia holes; it’s already five o’clock.’

Rosie shuddered, her eyes briefly closing, but Max and Jez both laughed. This was the longest-running joke in the newsroom: that they were all the kind of crude, callous Neanderthals who would actually stoop so low as to work for the Beast. The chief said: ‘Can I give you page fourteen, Max? There’s a single column about the Treasury being incompetent and a page lead about how the Yanks have stopped bombing other people long enough to execute one of their own teenagers. Supposedly a rapist, but the kid’s a legal retard – not unlike some subs I could mention, eh, Jez? – and probably didn’t do it. Straightforward enough: family’s—’

Max did not like being told how to run his pod by anyone, least of all the man whose job he planned to usurp. He interrupted: ‘Family’s anguish, miscarriage of justice, inhumane proceedings, etcetera. Just a little nip-tuck job, with—’

The chief interrupted him back. ‘Except this story’s got a lovely pair of fake tits as well. They’ve gone and fucked up the execution. Used some kind of own-brand lethal injection to save some dosh and it hasn’t worked properly.’

Max loathed being behind the story. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘So what’s happened?’

‘The kid’s still alive. They started executing him half an hour ago and he’s still…’ The chief stuck out his arms like a zombie, let his tongue loll from his mouth, and started convulsing.

Max asked, ‘Does that mean the story still needs to be written?’

The chief put his tongue back in. ‘No, it’s all there. They’ve left a space for how many minutes it goes on for. Just follow it on the wires and stick in the number when he stops shaking.’

Max wrote the names of the stories into the empty box marked ‘14’ on his flatplan. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘but if you give me many more pages the pod’s going to start to be understaffed.’

‘Good thing you’re the top sub then, isn’t it?’