Pacing back and forth across the corridor, Assistant Chief Constable John Broughton of Essex police looked like a man with a heavy weight on his mind. Throughout the Afghan airline hijacking that ended peacefully at Stansted Airport in the early hours of yesterday morning, he was the first line of contact for the world's media.
As anticipation grew, first that the armed hijackers were engaged in an elaborate plan to seek asylum in Britain, and second that the crisis was about to end, increasingly he fell back on routine guidance that everything was "calm and businesslike" on the aircraft.
One of the many questions arising from the crisis, after which the Home Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, said he was "naturally relieved" it had ended without loss of life or serious injury, is what exactly British police negotiators were talking about with the hijackers during more than 75 hours at Stansted.
The answer, on current information, is staggeringly mundane. When the Ariana Airlines aircraft, with more than 150 passengers and crew on board, landed at Stansted shortly after 2 a.m. on Monday morning, police negotiators quickly established a "routine" of delivering fresh water, food and generators that yielded positive results in the early stages of the standoff.
It often took up to two hours to arrange food deliveries to the aircraft and it was only in the final hour of negotiations that the political situation in Afghanistan was discussed. Politics aside, however, "housekeeping" deliveries are an established tit-for-tat negotiating tactic and it saw nine passengers released within the first two days.
The release of these passengers raised expectations that the hijackers, despite being armed with knives, detonators and grenades, might be prepared to place their trust in the negotiators and move swiftly to talk their way out of the crisis. It was not to be.
For the next 24 hours or so the deliveries continued but there was no resolution. The critical and potentially most dangerous stage of the negotiations came late on Tuesday night when, without warning, four crew members escaped from the aircraft by jumping through a cockpit window. For the negotiators, as John Broughton and his colleagues later admitted, it proved to be the most difficult moment of a tense and extremely delicate situation and it entirely changed the "dynamic" of the negotiations.
With the escape of the crew members, the hijackers began shouting at the passengers and made "significant threats". A few hours later, a fifth crew member was pushed from the aircraft.
And for the first time there was a real sense that whether the hijackers were seeking asylum or the release from prison of the Afghan military leader, Ismail Khan - or neither - the moment had arrived when the world might see images of dead or injured passengers being thrown from the aircraft. Fortunately, that fear was misplaced. The crisis ended peacefully and 21 people were arrested in connection with the hijacking while 74 people, thought to be hostages, including 14 women and children, are now seeking political asylum in Britain.
A number of questions arising from this crisis are now being chewed over by the British authorities. Is Britain set to become a haven for hijackers? And what are the implications for the authorities if asylum-seekers or hijackers, apparently threatening violence, land on British soil?
Under international agreements, Britain must allow an aircraft to land if it is in distress or if its passengers are under threat. In the House of Commons yesterday, Mr Straw explained that the aircraft was in fact running out of fuel on its approach to Stansted and that the hijackers had threatened to kill some of the passengers in the early stages of the flight. Therefore, the decision to allow the aircraft to land at Stansted was taken with very little room for manoeuvre.
The Home Secretary also spelt out the British government's determination not to allow force or the threat of force to be used as a ploy for securing political asylum. While insisting that the authorities would act in accordance with the law, Mr Straw said the British government was "utterly determined" that no one should consider there could be any benefit from hijacking.
But there are other pressing concerns. It is unclear at this stage whether any of the 60 people and their dependants who have so far claimed asylum are connected to or colluded with the hijackers.
The police and the Crown Prosecution Service will consider these questions in the coming days but again, under international treaties, the British government is legally obliged to consider their claims for asylum and, unfortunately for them, they will now join the Immigration Service's backlog of 100,000 cases.
These people may not be connected to the distressing events on board the aircraft, but the British authorities now face the prospect that the real hijackers will eventually claim political asylum. If that is the case, it would not be the first time that hijackers who have landed in Britain have turned out to be asylum-seekers claiming that their threats of violence were born of a "necessity" to flee oppressive governments. In 1996 six men who hijacked an aircraft insisting they were opposed to President Saddam Hussein were arrested at Stansted, freed on appeal, and are now seeking political asylum.
The British government is eager to be seen to act strongly against hijackers in the wake of this, the fourth major hijack situation at Stansted since 1975. It cannot ignore asylum-seekers, but whatever the hijackers' motives, justice is likely to be swift.