The journalists, who had to make do with ten stolen minutes in the canteen or a sandwich at their desks, watched them insolently, feet up on desks, fags dangling from mouths, the antagonism between the two groups palpable. They hated each other because editors gave the orders and chewed up the journalists’ work, while the journalists produced and bitched about editors’ cuts, even when their copy had been improved a hundredfold, perhaps especially then. A clump of editors were standing in the middle of the newsroom, sharing a final joke, when a flurry in the corridor caught everyone’s eye. William McGuigan, the paper’s chairman, as rarely seen in the newsroom as empathy or encouragement, made a dramatic double-doored entrance from the lifts. His large port-wine lips had deflated with age and lost their edges so that they reminded Paddy of an overripe fruit. He was flanked by five men, two in police uniform and three in plainclothes. One of them, a white-haired man in a pristine gabardine jacket, stood authoritatively out in front of the others, eyeing the room, suspicious of everyone.
