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patchwork of scars down his right arm, where a spray of bullets had landed as he raised the limb instinctively to protect himself. Down his legs, hit when the gunman stumbled and fell, and where the worst of the damage had been done. Lumps in his kneecaps with metal screws underneath. Rods down his thighs. He hadn’t been expected to walk again.
    It was 6.15 by the time he stepped back out onto the pavement. He was running a little bit later than planned, but not too late. The place wasn’t far. From the tourist map he’dpicked up in reception, he navigated the few short turns to get him there.
    The buzzer was on a thick metal door between a cut-price shoe shop and a Marie Curie’s. A small, laminated strip reading EANG in a metal slot beside it. No plaque or anything, not even the newspaper’s actual title on display, just the initials of its parent company, East Anglia News Group.
    He pressed the buzzer and waited. All the shops on the strip seemed to have closed for the night, but a steady flow of people drifted past. Overweight women pushing prams, trailing overweight children with cartons of fries in their hands. Teenage boys in slouchy jeans and hooded tops, hawking gobs of spit onto the ground. Teenage girls in short skirts and bare legs, shouting to each other and laughing. Most of the women, young and older, had multicoloured haircuts like Julie Boone’s and a similar array of facial silverware. Not so different from the inhabitants of any high street in London, but for their voices. And the fact that, despite the chill of the early evening, nobody was wearing a coat.
    A woman’s voice came through the intercom: “
Ernemouth Mercury
.”
    “Sean Ward to see Francesca Ryman, please,” he spoke into the grill.
    “Do you have an appointment?” the tone was vaguely challenging.
    “She is expecting me, yes.”
    “Oh.” A pause, a crackle of static. “All right then, sir, come straight up the stairs, and take the first on the left.” The buzz of an electronic lock being withdrawn.
    Sean pushed the door open, went up one flight of stairs to the reception where the owner of the voice sat behind a modernblack desk, a banner with the newspaper’s masthead above her on a perspex screen. A small, open-plan office spread out behind her.
    A middle-aged woman in a cream blouse and blue cardigan, thick chestnut hair cut into a wavy wedge, and grey-green eyes that ran over him speculatively. Sean gave her his warmest smile but her expression remained cool. “You need to sign here,” she pushed across a book and a pen. “If you’ll just hold on.” Raising the receiver of her telephone, she tapped out three digits.
    “A Mr Ward to see you, Fran, says he’s expected, only I don’t have anything written down for you in my book. Oh, OK. That’s right. I’ll tell him.”
    She put the phone down and pointed in the direction of the office. “Go straight through, she’s right at the end there,” she said.
    The
Ernemouth Mercury
was a small operation. To his left, with their desks arranged around a whiteboard, was the advertising department: two young men with jackets draped over the back of their swivel chairs and hair gelled up, yakking away on the phones; an older guy with the thickened red face of an experienced drinker, hair tinted several shades of blond, sharing a joke with someone on the other end of the line while rearranging his bollocks in his navy-blue trousers.
    To his right, four women at desks that faced each other, their screens covered with Post-it notes, all of them tapping away furiously. Two of them were about the same age as the ad boys, dressed in prim black skirt suits with their hair pinned up. The third had bottle-thick glasses and wavy brown hair, dressed more casually in grey sweater, jeans and trainers. The fourth was an older woman with hair dyed a violent shade oforange, a pea-green blouse and matching eyes that locked on to her screen in deadly seriousness.
    Francesca Ryman’s desk