He had raised the ruler several inches above his right ear when there was a knock on his open door and Jean, his secretary, entered and he was obliged to convert the blow into a pensive scratching.

“The schedule. Twenty minutes.” She peeled off a sheet and gave it to him and left the rest on the conference table as she went out.

He scanned the lists. Under Foreign, Dibben was writing on “Garmony’s Washington triumph.” That would need to be a skeptical piece, or a hostile one. And if it really was a triumph, it could stay off the front page. On the Home list was, at long last, the piece by the science editor on an antigravity machine from a university in Wales. It was an attention-grabber and Vernon had pushed for it, half dreaming of a gizmo you strapped to the bottom of your shoes. In fact the thing turned out to weigh four tons, required nine million volts, and didn’t even work. They were running the piece anyway, at the bottom of the front page. Also under Home was “Piano quartet,” quadruplets born to a concert pianist. His deputy, along with features and the whole home desk, was fighting him over this, all of them hiding their fastidiousness behind a pretense of realism. Four wasn’t enough these days, they were saying; and no one had ever heard of the mother, who wasn’t pretty anyway and didn’t want to talk to the press. Vernon had overruled them. Last month’s circulation average was seven thousand lower than the month before. Time was running out for \hejudge. He was still considering whether to run a story about Siamese twins joined at the hip who had secured a job in local government. One of their hearts was weak, so they couldn’t be separated. “If we’re going to save this paper,” Vernon liked to say at the morning editorial conference, “you’re all going to have to get your hands dirty.” Everyone nodded, nobody agreed. As far as the old hands, the “grammarians,” were concerned, the Judge would stand or fall by its intellectual probity. They felt safe in this view because no one on the paper, apart from Vernon’s predecessors, had ever been sacked.

The first of the section editors and deputies were filing in when Jean waved to him from the door to pick up the phone. It had to be important because she was mouthing a name. George Lane, her lips said, Vernon turned his back on the room and remembered how he had avoided Lane at the funeral. “George. A deeply moving occasion. I was going to drop you a—”

“Yes, yes. Something’s come up. I think you should see it.”

“What sort of thing?”

“Photographs.”

“Can you bike them round?”

“Absolutely not, Vernon. This is very, very hot. Can’t you come now?”

Not all Vernon’s contempt for George Lane had to do with Molly. Lane owned one and a half percent of the Judge and had put money into the relaunch that marked the fall of Jack Mobey and Vernon’s elevation. George thought that Vernon was in his debt. Also, George knew nothing about newspapers, which was why he thought the editor of a national daily could saunter out of his office to cross the entire width of London to Holland Park at eleven-thirty in the morning.

“I’m rather busy at present,” Vernon said.

“I’m doing you a big favor here. Sort of thing the News of the World would kill for.”

“I could be there sometime after nine this evening.”

“Very well. I’ll see you then,” George said huffily, and rang off.

By now every chair but one at the conference table had been taken, and as Vernon lowered himself into it the conversation subsided. He touched the side of his head. Now that he was in company again, back on the job, his interior absence was no longer an affliction. Yesterday’s paper was spread before him. He said into the near silence, “Who subbed the environment leader?”

“Pat Redpath.”

“On this paper, hopefully is not a sentence adverb, nor will it ever be, especially in a leader, for godsakes. And none…” He trailed away for dramatic effect while pretending to scan the piece. “None usually takes a singular verb. Can we get these two things generally understood?”

Vernon was aware of the approval round the table.

This was the kind of thing the grammarians liked to hear. Together they would see the paper into the grave with its syntax pure.

Crowd-pleaser dispensed, he pressed on at speed. One of his few successful innovations, perhaps his only one so far, was to have reduced the daily conference from forty to fifteen minutes by means of a few modestly imposed rules: no more than five minutes on the postmortem—what’s done is done; no joke-telling, and above all, no anecdotes—he didn’t tell them, so no one else could. He turned to the international pages and frowned. “An exhibition of pottery shards in Ankara? A news item? Eight hundred words? I simply don’t get it, Frank.”

Frank Dibben, the deputy foreign editor, explained, perhaps with a trace of mockery. “Well, you see, Vernon, it represents a fundamental shift in our understanding of the influence of the early Persian Empire on—”

“Paradigm shifts in broken pots aren’t news, Frank.”

Grant McDonald, the deputy editor, who was sitting at Vernon’s elbow, cut in gently. “Thing is, Julie failed to file from Rome. They had to fill the—”

“Not again. What is it now?”

“Hepatitis C.”

“So what about AP?”

Dibben spoke up. “This was more interesting.”

“You’re wrong. It’s a complete turnoff. Even the TLS wouldn’t run it.”

They moved on to the day’s schedule. In turn the editors summarized the stories on their lists. When it came to Frank’s turn, he pushed for his Garmony story to lead the front page.

Vernon heard him out, and then: “He’s in Washington when he should be in Brussels. He’s cutting a deal with the Americans behind the Germans’ backs. Short-term gain, long-term disaster. He was a terrible home secretary, he’s even worse at the Foreign Office, and he’ll be the ruin of us if he’s ever prime minister—which is looking more and more likely.”

“Well, yes,” Frank agreed, his softness of tone concealing his fury about the Ankara put-down. “You said all that in your leader, Vernon. Surely the point is not whether we agree with the deal, but whether it’s significant.”

Vernon was wondering whether he might just bring himself to let Frank go. What was he doing wearing an earring?

“Quite right, Frank,” Vernon said cordially. “We’re in Europe. The Americans want us in Europe. The special relationship is history. The deal has no significance. The coverage stays on the inside pages. Meanwhile, We’ll continue to give Garmony a hard time.”

They listened to the sports editor, whose pages Vernon had recently doubled at the expense of arts and books. Then it was the turn of Lettice O’Hara, the features editor.

“I need to know if we can go ahead with the “Welsh children’s home.”

Vernon said, “I’ve seen the guest list. A lot of big cheeses. We can’t afford the legal costs if it goes wrong.”

Lettice looked relieved, and began to describe an investigative piece she had commissioned on a medical scandal in Holland.

“Apparently, doctors are exploiting the euthanasia laws to—”

Vernon interrupted her. “I want to run the Siamese twins story in Friday’s paper.”

There were groans. But who was going to object first?

Lettice. “We don’t even have a picture.”

“So send someone to Middlesborough this afternoon.” There was sullen silence, so Vernon continued. “Look, they work in a section of the local hygiene department called Forward Planning. It’s a sub’s dream.”

The home editor, Jeremy Ball, said, “We spoke last week and it was okay. Then he phoned yesterday. I mean, it was the other half. The other head. Doesn’t want to talk. Doesn’t want a picture.”

“Oh God!” Vernon cried. “Don’t you see? That’s all part of the story. They’ve fallen out. First thing anyone would want to know—how do they settle disputes?”