‘If our roles were reversed, would you tell me?’

I am only half aware that I’m raving. Along the corridor, heads poke from doors to watch, just in case one of us throws a punch (which has happened in this over-testosteroned place).

‘Can you calm down, Gil? It was wrong of me to bring it up.’ I want him to feed my fury, instead he is conciliatory. ‘Forgive me. It was a terrible thing you’ve been through and . . .’

‘Just fuck off.’

‘I’m in the wrong, but maybe it’s a mistake for you to be at work.’ I walk round him and into the FC’s room.

‘Sanctimonious prick,’ I mutter, just loud enough for him and everyone to hear.

What could Clare have wanted to tell Scott, with his stamp collector’s brain and his obsession with proving that every Tory MP is on the take? I am tormented by the feeling that he’s stolen something my sister wanted to give me. Jeremy’s ramblings at the funeral come back to me, something about: A piece of work we had been doing for months on the tax breaks available to pension funds. We were just a couple of days away from putting out a white paper on it when the whole thing was canned. She had a blistering row with the Chancellor.

Would she have been angry enough to leak to a journalist, to Scott? I turn back to him. ‘Don’t be such a dick,’ I shout. ‘Literally no one is interested in pensions.’ His gaze shifts down to my shoes. Ah, nailed him.

The FC’s office is on the courtyard side of the Burma Road, roughly in the middle. As political editor, I have a separate desk by the window, while the rest of the team are squashed on a scuffed table. At full strength there are six of us, and by five o’clock the room will be a cacophony of keyboards clattering away like a typing pool, interspersed with the chirruping of mobile phones. I am the second to turn up. Predictably, Jessica Neeskens has her nose buried in a five-hundred-page parliamentary select committee report with its characteristic powder-blue cover.

‘Do you actually have a life?’ I ask.

‘That’s rich from someone supposed to be on compassionate leave.’