Jeremy swung himself into his chair as if into a cockpit. He’d been absent from his desk for long enough that his monitor had turned off. He impatiently tapped the space bar until the image of PagePlanner reappeared, fuzzy for an instant before it snapped into focus. He checked on the young ones’ progress. Rosie still had her Criminal Immigrant story open; there must be some kind of weakness in it. But more stories had come through and she was also locked into a Scientific Study about how cats could communicate by wiggling their ears. She would need to pick up the pace. Will was editing a celebrity picture story about how the supermodel Kate Kloss’s drug-addled boyfriend had been caught with the Radio 1 DJ Edith Bohler, and was thrashing the keys in a continuous clatter. That meant he was rewriting a lot; and he’d already done more stories than Rosie. The boy had no shortage of confidence.

Jeremy again cast his eyes around the room. Reporters were rushing around the Newsdesk with messages and printouts while Geraldine gave orders and demanded information. Several were standing with telephones wedged between shoulder and ear, trying to block out the noise around them and taking shorthand. Others were already producing copy, leaning towards their screens and snapping at Geraldine’s deputy when he hurried them further. The rest of the newsroom, which was anyway moving into the fraught time of the evening, had caught their unease. No one now was chatting or wandering over to other desks to ask a question. They were typing, typing, typing, and their questions were shouted.

Jez opened the Tragic Schoolgirl. The shape had changed again, but thankfully the headline still fit. He saw it with the diagrammatic clarity of an exploded drawing: the news line in par one; how it happened in par two; geography in three; reaction in four. Her father saying, ‘I don’t even understand. I haven’t seen her yet. She was looking forward to the abseiling trip and the school were… How could this have happened?’ ‘She’d been looking forward to the trip’ would do as a pull-quote; and, with a copy and paste, it was done.

The red box at the bottom of the screen told him that he was ten lines over. He snipped, he cut, he ran two paragraphs together. The school’s statement was boring and could come down. The reader didn’t really need to know what her mother’s job was. Four lines over. And there might—

He noticed something happening at the BeastOnline desks. The onliners were standing up, pulling on coats, flicking their hair over their collars. They looked afraid and their overseers were haranguing them to move faster. They swept their things into their bags, quickly switched their computers off at the plug and made for the exit.