On the third floor, at the double doors to the newsroom, she takes her keycard out of her coat pocket. She stares at it in her hand. Slowly, she draws it up to the sensor. She’s amazed to see the light turn green. There’s a beep and the door handle releases into her hand. She crosses the threshold.

The newsroom is in darkness except for the odd desk lamp left on, a tiny flash here and there from a sleeping printer.

She walks down the blue carpet path, forgetting as she does that each light disguised in the suspended ceiling above her will blink into life, lighting her way. Either side of her, the windows instantly turn to mirrors. She watches herself in them as she walks – an intruder. She looks away and moves quickly, purposefully. She doesn’t intend to stay long.

Her melamine desk has now become a dumping ground for boxes; even her swivel chair has three lever-arch files stacked on it. She stands, paying a moment’s respect to the graveyard of her working life. Suddenly, from the other end of the room, she hears a click, a rumble. She jumps, ducking down before realizing it’s the coffee machine. But it reminds her, she needs to work quickly.

Chloe heads into the archive, quickly finding the drawer marked KR–LA. She pulls it open, the scratch of metal tearing through the silence. She finds the Kyles.

Kyle; Amanda

Kyle; Norman

Kyle; Sharon

Kyle; Patricia

Kyle; Angela.

Bingo. She pulls it out, it’s more creased than she remembered, but when she peers in, she can see all the cuttings are there, packed away in a tight weave.

The nearest photocopier is outside the editor’s office. She presses the standby button and wills the machine to life. It clunks and clicks, waking dozy from slumber.

‘Come on,’ she whispers to herself as she taps the top of the machine. ‘Come on.’

She counts the seconds until the green light on the ‘ready’ button flashes and when it does, Chloe empties the cuttings onto Sandra’s in-tray. Then she starts unfolding them one by one, smoothing out the creases, putting one under the scanner at a time, watching, satisfied, as copy after copy appears in the tray beneath.

‘Come on,’ she says again to no one but herself.

She curses when she has to pause to refill the A4 paper tray.

She goes on and on like this, the pile in the tray getting thicker, stopping only to feed the machine more paper. One eye on the door at the top of the office which is once again plunged into darkness.

As the pile grows so does her excitement. She takes one copy from the stack at random; the photographs aren’t perfect, some emotion in the faces of Maureen and Patrick has been replaced with inkjet splodges, but the rest is there: the words, the detail. That’s exactly what she needs.