‘OK, that’s more back-up for “blind” in the headline as long as we explain.’

Geraldine shouted, ‘Max!’ and started striding towards him. Max talked faster. ‘So the story is blind woman mugged by Big Issue Bulgarian she was giving a donation to. Even though she has some sight, she was too terrified to stop him. Write it like that, and I need it now.’

Geraldine reached their pod. ‘I’ve got some marks,’ she said with a measure of deference, since Max was handling the splash. ‘Can I make them over your shoulder?’ Max nodded and she hurried around behind him. Pushing her hair out of her face, she took an instant to size up the page, whose layout was changing continuously as the Art desk worked on it.

Unfurled across the first spread was the map showing the bombers’ routes and the concentric red circles spreading around Copper House. To the right were photographs of the four terrorists. They’d been taken from Facebook and were of varying quality. Kayani, who’d obviously taken the photo himself, his arm stretching to the bottom corner of the shot, had arresting brown eyes and a soft, boyish, sparsely bearded chin. Although Turkish Anna had done her best to find pictures in which they all looked fanatical, this – the only useable one – showed him grinning happily. As she watched, Max captioned it ‘MENACING’.

Underneath was a profile panel: where the terrorists lived, what branch of Nando’s one of them worked in, where in West London they’d grown up, the fact that two of them held season tickets at Queen’s Park Rangers, that one of Kayani’s schoolteachers had said of him, ‘He was a nice, shy boy who fell in with the wrong crowd.’ For an instant, Max considered using that for the panel headline. But this wasn’t the Conscientious; this was the Beast. He wrote ‘Home-grown fanatics’.

To the left of the map was another photo, taken that afternoon. It showed Kayani’s elder brother in front of the terraced family house, his face twisted into an ugly snarl and his fist raised. Beneath it was a mocked-up transcript headlined ‘You’re dead – terror brother’s chilling rant’. A selection of the most striking quotes had been written out in a typewriter-style font. ‘Your Britain is finished.’ Geraldine wordlessly pointed out that it actually said ‘Yuor’. ‘Jez,’ said Max, with audible calm, ‘Could you tell Graphics to correct their literal in “your” in the transcript before the Editor sees it?’

Jeremy pushed off from his desk and, before his chair had stopped rolling, was on his feet and moving.

‘Righty-oh,’ said Geraldine. ‘We need to get in quite high up’ – Max scrolled to the top of the page – ‘maybe in there’ – she pressed a fingertip to the screen – ‘that these chaps were on bail awaiting trial on terror-related charges, which we haven’t actually said anywhere.’