What escaped the notice of the gravedigger – and indeed of the security men who should have known better – was a figure who, under the gaze of the disinterested chauffeurs who stood smoking by their cars, moved from the perimeter road, past the cars and towards the funeral. To the extent that any of the drivers thought about this man at all, they thought, This should be interesting. Should be a bit of a show when security get their hands on this turkey.

The man wore a long mac, suitable attire for the weather. As he narrowed the distance between himself and the funeral, he opened the mac. Slightly awkwardly, thanks to his still-wounded arm, he took from it a Heckler & Koch MP7 that had once belonged to a man named Owen Flyte.

He raised the MP7 to his shoulder and began firing.

The security men died first. Kennedy, being part of that group, also fell, followed shortly by the lawyer, Jeffrey Coombs, who had been reluctant to attend the funeral but thought he should pay his respects. Next to die were Ross, Montana and Cliff.

The last to fall was Juliet Norton, who lay beside her son’s open grave with a bullet in her chest, not far from where the vicar cowered, traumatised but otherwise unharmed.

She looked up at the man who had come to kill her.

‘You,’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ said Abbott dispassionately, ‘me.’

He put a bullet in her head, and then turned and ran to the perimeter road and into the passenger seat of an Audi waiting there.

In the driving seat, Tess.

He looked at her. ‘They’ll be coming for us,’ he told her. ‘Everybody will be coming for us. Everybody.’

Ex-Special Forces soldier Alex Abbott escaped the Middle East under a cloud and now lives hand-to-mouth in Singapore. Scraping a living as a gun for hire and estranged from his family, Abbott is haunted by ghosts of the past, drinking to dull the pain.

When a job goes badly wrong, Abbott’s in hot water. Next he learns that his military son, Nathan, is missing in Iraq. Knowing something is wrong, Abbott has no choice but to go back.

As the body count rises and old wounds open, Alex he struggles to confront his demons, self-medicating the only way he knows how. But when one of his old crew turns up dead in mysterious circumstances and the link with Nathan is clear, Abbott begins to suspect a trap.

But who is the hunter? And who is the hunted?

Where is your break point?

Is it here? Facing the gruelling SAS selection process on one leg, with a busted ankle and the finish line nowhere in sight?

Or here? Under heavy fire from armed kidnappers while protecting journalists en route to Baghdad?

Or is it here? At the bottom of a bottle, with a family in pieces, unable to adapt to a civilian lifestyle, yearning for a warzone?