As the first guest, a political columnist on the Conscientious, told Hugh that she thought he was absolutely right, Jeremy hummed with contentment. He was riding too high to be twinged by the three boys beaten up in Luton, and this earnest, safe BBC indignation was precisely the tone that the luvvies took when their feathers had been well and truly ruffled. It was how the establishment spoke whenever the Beast got too boisterous for its sensibilities. The BBC must feel off the pace today: the Beast had the story of a generation and all they could do was comment on it. Ames himself had done a couple of years on the Beast before going straight, and Jeremy had been drinking with him a few times. He might look out Ames’s email address and tease him a little.

Amused by that thought, he stopped listening. It had rained in the night and dark patches of damp still leant in shadow-shapes across roads and pavements. Wisps of spent cloud drifted over the city. The traffic was light. It was a good morning.

When he arrived at Copper House, he saw that the police had set up a cordon across the streets around the building. A black cab ahead of him made a U-turn in the road and headed back the way it had come. He noticed a few snappers loitering on the pavement, one of whom he recognized as a freelance who’d gone to the Respectable.

There were knots of armed police in paramilitary-blue jumpsuits and matching baseball caps, their hands on the submachine guns slung across their chests. They stood separate from the ordinary policemen in fluorescent-yellow rain jackets and peaked black hats, one of whom signalled him to come forward. A chicane of orange barriers had been laid out for a hundred yards or so before the cordon itself and, as he manoeuvred cautiously through it, Jeremy realized, his stomach turning over, that it was to slow down car-bombers.

He was stopped by a tense officer about his own age who started telling him he couldn’t get through here. But Jeremy showed his pass for the Beast and the policeman said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir.’ He waved at his colleagues to move the barrier aside and gave Jeremy a nod of respect, man to man.

He parked in his usual spot underground, then went out into the tree-canopied square behind the building. A crowd of people from the paper was gathered there, nervously pushing their mini-suitcases back and forth and breathing cigarette smoke into the morning air. Holding their suit-bags over their shoulders by the thin metal coat-hangers, they were gabbling and slapping each other on the shoulder in unnatural excitement.