It was not a good fit. He considered, and his considerations were interrupted by Max: ‘We need to get the two dead into the headline. That’s the story.’

Will glanced up, hid his glower and brightly said, ‘OK, got it.’

He tried:

TWO DEAD AS TRAGEDY

UNFOLDS AT EPIC CHARITY MARATHON

He retracted his fingers tightly into fists, then drummed them on the air above his keyboard. It was harder when someone was watching.

TWO DEATHS IN TRAGEDY

AT EPIC CHARITY MARATHON

Losing ‘epic’ would do it.

TWO DEATHS IN TRAGEDY

AT CHARITY MARATHON

That second line wasn’t a great fit either.

TWO DEATHS IN TRAGEDY

AT CHARITY FUNDRAISER

But this was far from a subtly sarcastic ‘epic tragedy marathon’ for him to show Rosie – it was just a commonplace Beast headline, and a fairly flat one at that. He felt close to giving up. But at least he’d done it quickly and with Max breathing down his neck. Ugh, ‘breathing down his neck’; more of this cliché, these fragments of sense, cracked and bashed together like old stones in a dyke.

Every day he became more accustomed to it. And, if he was honest with himself, Rosie probably wouldn’t even appreciate a joke about ‘epic tragedy’. Perhaps he should try and get back into academia. He could email Professor Rusthall and ask—

All at once, there was a bellowing and trumpeting from the back corner of the newsroom, a noise like a maddened bull elephant trampling a stand of insubordinate bamboo. As it moved closer, the noise resolved into a voice. It was not a shout, but it resonated. The voice was saying, ‘Which motherfucker put this in my newspaper? Which of you fucking halfwits thought this was an appealing layout? Who? You? You’re an idiot, man, a blithering fucking cretin. How did you get a job here? What fool hired you? Sit down, damn you, I’ll draw the page myself. Get me a pencil. Not a pen! And stop shaking, man. Good Christ, is this what the Art desk has been reduced to? How the fuck do you intend to cope when you have some real work to do?’

It was a quarterdeck voice, the kind that rang through an Atlantic storm to chase its sailors up the rigging. Or, as it came closer, something like that of an exasperated headmaster on the games field. In this voice was a rising note of querulousness, as if it were surrounded by incompetents, bunglers, amateurs falling woefully short of even the minimum standards of professional journalism, and only the owner of this voice, he alone, truly understood how to spot a story, how to angle that story, how to write it, sub it, draw it, headline it.