She heard the chief shout: ‘Twenty-one is coming again. Twenty-one V-one.’

The pairer called back, ‘Twenty-one V-one,’ and said into the phone, ‘Twenty-one coming again now. Twenty-one V-one.’

Geraldine was returning with the lawyer. Max said, ‘Now, Rosie.’

She said, ‘One minute.’

‘What’s the problem?’

‘The paragraphs are falling badly across the pull-quote.’

‘Put it down; I’ll sort it.’

She closed her InCopy window, unlocking the text for Max.

Just as he was about to open it, Geraldine arrived with the lawyer behind her. Jeremy and Max caught each other’s eye. Max did not have time to ask him, but just said, ‘Move the pull-quote wherever you need. Art desk can fuck themselves if they’re going—’

And already the lawyer had reached him and was saying in his South African accent, ‘We need to tread very carefully here. They’ve sued us before. We need to fix it so they have no reason whatsoever to believe someone might even potentially think we’re talking about them.’ Rosie listened to his accent as if to the radio. She was trying to get on with the next task, proofreading, but she’d had a story taken away from her, and her concentration, like a filament through which too high a current has passed, was blown.

Nor did the lawyer seem on top of things. His gelled white-blond hair was sticking out from one side of his head and the muscle in the corner of his right eye was jumping uncontrollably. He said, ‘Can’t we be completely unambiguous and refer to this mosque as “the West Acton community centre”?’

Geraldine was disgusted. ‘It makes it sound as if they’re putting on a bake sale. They’re death-dealing fanatics, for Christ’s sake.’

The lawyer, out of some unconscious habit long divorced from its original purpose, stretched his mouth into a grin. Max said, ‘After first mention, when we’ll give it the full community-centre title, we can call it the “terror mosque”. If this other lot think that might refer to them, we can say that that can only be because they themselves think they’re terrorist sympathizers. Making that connection would never have occurred to us.’

The lawyer thought for a second. His eye-muscle hopped as he said, ‘Fine, as long we put the full name at first mention. But we’ve got a heap of other problems. Naming these four men and accusing them of—’

There was a bellowing from the corner; the Editor was back in the newsroom. His great voice rang out: ‘Who wrote this headline? Who the fuck put a headline this boring in my newspaper? I don’t care if the page has gone. Can’t you understand there’s no point it going with a headline like that? Get it back and think of something better!’

The chief shouted, ‘Kill page sixteen. Kill sixteen, darling.’ The pairers replied, ‘Kill sixteen,’ and said into the phone, ‘Kill page sixteen, all editions.’