Now to dress. A few weeks back he’d won the pub’s quiz and been given a T-shirt bearing its name as a prize. Partly in the absence of anything else that was remotely clean, and partly in a bid to butter up Nigel, he pulled it on, dragging an unbuttoned black shirt over the top of it.

He checked himself in the mirror. Not good, but then again not too bad. Yes, he looked as though he’d been in the wars, but at least he didn’t have the appearance of a drunken wreck.

‘You’re not fooling anybody, you know,’ Cuckoo had said to him, and he was right about that. In the supermarket Abbott had exchanged a glance with another guy buying his daily supply. Nothing was said. No words exchanged. Just that look. The look that told both men, Here is a fellow traveller.

‘What have you become?’ Abbott asked himself aloud, and when no answer was forthcoming, he left his room and made his way carefully downstairs, trying to ignore the throbbing in his head.

He reached the landing below and there stood the little Somalian kid, the same one from before.

‘You look better, man,’ said the kid, and Abbott, who had been about to hurry past, stopped in his tracks. As a Royal Marine, he’d spent time in Northern Ireland and joined Operation Desert Storm in Iraq. As a member of the SBS, he had worked in counterterrorism, gone up against drug gangs and carried out counterinsurgency operations.

Then there was his humanitarian work. As part of a four-man team, he had worked with a charity to crack a child-trafficking ring in Thailand, rescuing kids, bringing them to safety.

He thought of the lads. Ward, the explosives expert, who now ran a garden centre in Whitstable. Miller, who had morphed into a personal trainer, and Brace, a full-time mercenary who was also the best sniper Abbott had ever worked with.

Worldwide, over 1.6 million kids a year were sold into sex slavery. Abbott, Ward, Miller and Brace had rescued twenty-two of them on one occasion, and even though it was such a small drop in the ocean, it was those rescues that had given Abbott his proudest moments.

Kids like this one? For a moment, Abbott felt the shackles of his ever-present grief fall away as he cast a practised eye over the boy, taking in the fact that he looked nourished and wore clean, if ageing clothes. Most importantly, there was a light in his eyes.

‘How’s things with you, mate?’ he said.

‘I’m very good, man,’ the kid grinned. ‘Better than you.’

Abbott ran a finger over the scab. ‘You like my cut, do you? You ever get any cuts and bruises yourself?’

‘If I fall over.’

‘You fall over often?’