Looming over her table, Tusk Musso was holding a plate of sausages and scrambled eggs and waiting for an invitation to sit down. He caught her with a mouthful of food, necessitating some awkward hand gestures as she juggled a knife and fork and her cup of coffee. Musso took the seat opposite.

‘Saw you in the gym this morning, as I shuffled past,’ he chuckled. ‘I’m afraid I don’t practise the combat arts as much as I used to. I’m getting a bit old and brittle for it. Most dangerous cripple in America, that’s me.’

‘You don’t look like you’re about to fall over,’ replied Caitlin, smiling. ‘Unlike some this morning.’

The general grinned with the appreciative malevolence of somebody who hadn’t drunk too much. ‘I don’t imagine Ty McCutcheon will be putting his head in there or here anytime soon,’ he said. ‘Last I saw of him, he was being dragged off to his room by a couple of Rangers.’

So he didn’t score. Useful to know . . . Even gossip could be useful to know.

‘Well, you know the air force, sir,’ she joked. ‘The hardest drinkingest service of all. Although, I’ll give you your due. For a Leatherneck, you didn’t do too badly last night.’

Musso started in on his scrambled eggs, bulldozing them up with a piece of beef sausage. ‘Do you think it helped?’ he asked, ignoring the troll bait.

It was the sort of question he would ask of his military liaison officer, but of course they both knew that she was nothing of the sort. Caitlin wondered whether he was genuinely curious about her reading of the night, or just playing to her cover.

‘Depends,’ she said. ‘On how straight he was with us. On how much influence he has with Blackstone. Maybe even on whether he wakes up with sailor’s nuts and gets pissed off he didn’t get to have his end away with those two cuties he was bouncing on his knee last night.’

A look appeared on Musso’s face that was a little confused, but mostly inquisitive.

‘Have his end away? You sound like you spent some time in England, Colonel Murdoch.’

Caitlin mopped up some runny yolk with a piece of toast on the end of her fork. The eggs looked to be free range, from the rich, bright orange of the yolk. She wondered where they sourced them. They reminded her of the farm in Wiltshire.

‘That’s how I missed the Wave,’ she said, dropping into the background story of her mission jacket. ‘I was on a posting with the RAF. Only supposed to be there six months. Ended up staying nearly three years in all the confusion. Never developed a taste for warm beer, but I did get some schooling in how to drink whiskey during a stint up in Scotland at RAF Leuchars.’