After she hangs up, I return to my chair and stare at the white strip lighting that vandalises a white ceiling of moulded coving and cornices. Half a plan forms in my head. I bound down the steps two at a time to the ground floor and ask the morning-coated attendant in the wooden booth on Palace Yard to switch on the illuminating call sign to summon a black taxi.

The taxi takes me on a short journey across Westminster Bridge, past Waterloo, to the FC’s office in Blackfriars. Near lunchtime, the newsroom is warming up. There is a bank of clocks at the river end, showing the time in New York, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong. To its right is an electronic ticker tape feed from Reuters flashing up share prices and headlines. This is not the raucousness of a tabloid newsroom or a commodities trading pit. But around a hundred people are chatting on phones, or to each other, or munching overfilled sandwiches at their desks. At the centre of the hive is the queen, the news editor, Mary Nichols.

‘Wotcha, Peck. Makes a change to see you with your clothes on.’

The news editors of the different sections – foreign, home, markets, companies – snigger.

‘Can we have a word in private?’ I ask.

‘No problem. Boys, I’ll be back in five,’ she tells them.

I follow her to a row of glass boxes, each about twelve feet square, that run along the edge of the room like oversized fish tanks. She offers me a black leather and chrome Corbusier-inspired stool, while she leans back in the capacious swivel chair behind her desk. The hierarchy is clear.

‘What’s on your mind?’

‘There’s a story I want to write that’s quite, ah, sensitive.’

‘That sounds promising.’

‘You remember the pensions raid we were talking about a couple of weeks ago? I’ve been looking at it some more, and I’ve reason to believe that there’s more to why it was dropped than just a simple change of heart. I think Schon killed it.’

I have her attention. At the FC, we’re obsessed with Schon, though not in a consistent way. Half the time we paint them as superheroes, the rest of the time as arch villains.

‘Go on.’

The painful truth is I don’t have much more. ‘Schon got wind of the pensions tax change and leaned on the Chancellor to drop it.’

‘Can you prove it?’

‘I can prove they had a meeting.’

‘Meetings happen all the time. So what?’

‘The Chancellor dropped the policy moments afterwards.’ And my sister called him fucking corrupt.

Her grey eyes bore into me. ‘That’s not enough. Why was Schon doing this? For itself or for a client?’

I’m running out of facts. Time to improvise. ‘I am pretty sure it was for a client.’