By the time it appeared on the screen of the news editor of the Sunday World he’d already had a phone call from a member of the public keen to earn a tip-off fee. He’d assigned two reporters to start phoning the police and their Sinn Fein contacts and was trying to track down their Belfast stringers.

It was 5.30 p.m., the crossing over point when the day shift began to drift off to the pub and the night reporters were arriving. The picture desk had sent two freelances and a staffer to the scene, but Knightsbridge was at least half an hour’s drive away from the paper’s Docklands offices.

More information was trickling over the wires on PA and Reuters and the death toll kept climbing with each snatch of copy.

‘Jesus, now they’re saying twelve dead,’ said Jon Simpson, the news editor. Behind him stood the chief sub and the editor, reading over his shoulder.

‘Splash?’ said the chief sub, knowing the answer would be yes. The front page lead at the afternoon conference had been a sixties pop star’s drug problem.

‘We’ll have to pull our fingers out if we’re going to make the first edition,’ said the editor. ‘We’ll take the whole of page one, two and three, let me see the pics first. Hold the MP story until next week and hack back the food safety feature. Hang on, no, drop it altogether. And we’ll save the splash until next week as well, it’s exclusive.’ The chief sub scurried back to his terminal to redraw his page plans, shouting to the picture editor to send over everything he had.

‘You’ve got two hours until the first edition, Jon. Get everybody on it.’ The editor wandered over to the picture desk while Simpson picked up the phone.

‘Where’s Woody?’ Simpson yelled at his deputy who was busy scrolling through the PA wire.

‘Where do you think?’ he shouted back, raising his eyebrows.

‘Drunken pig,’ said Simpson and rang the King’s Head, a short stagger away from the office.

As the phone trilled behind the bar, Ian Wood was downing his second double Bells and trying to look down the front of the barmaid’s blouse. She saw what he was up to and flicked her towel at him and laughed. ‘Don’t let Sandy catch you doing that,’ she scolded and he grinned.

‘Your husband’s too good a guv’nor to go slapping the customers around,’ he said, finishing his whisky.

‘Another?’ she said as she picked up the phone. She listened and then mouthed silently ‘Are you in?’

‘Who’s asking?’ he mouthed back.

‘The office,’ she replied, and he realised they looked like a couple of goldfish gasping for breath. He nodded and took the phone off her. She picked his glass up and refilled it.

‘Woody, are you on for a double shift?’ asked Simpson.

Woody looked at the double measure of whisky in his glass and licked his lips but hesitated for only a second before he told Simpson he’d do it. Woody was a freelance and he needed the money. If he’d been staff he’d have told the news editor where to get off, but it had been a long time since anyone had given Ian Wood a staff job.