Legitimate or not, it was the greatest gift anyone could have given me. From the ashes of my father’s plane wreck, and the depths of my mother’s grave, rose Private Max McLean. A new life. Unidentified. Untraceable. Undetectable. Or so I’d thought.

At Raven Hill, Colonel Ellard didn’t care what you were called. He cared what you did. And what I did was learn to kill. When I said hello to Ellard I said goodbye to the army. Officially, I ceased to exist. I surfaced into the Unknown – a special operations kill team called by its army acronym: UKN.

But whereas, once upon a time, I’d been motivated by the idea of service, now I was prepared to kill without illusion. Quite what that made me, exactly, I wasn’t yet ready to speak out loud. It’s hard to accept yourself as someone you don’t admire. At forty-two years old I was pushing it in the self-awareness stakes. But even old soldiers have to look in the mirror sometimes – if only to see who’s standing behind them.

All I saw was a ghost.

Every story has a beginning. The trick is knowing where to find it. I’d always thought my first kill was a long shot I’d taken across the roofs of West Belfast. It wasn’t. The first life I’d ended was mine: Maximilian Ivan Drax Pierpoint Mac Ghill’ean was dead and buried.

Chasing his memory at Doc Levy’s – or mooning over his daughter – wasn’t going to bring him back. I sat on the bed and closed my eyes. She’tamut. I could choose to celebrate my death, or to regret it – but, either way, the last threads of my past were at breaking point.

Downstairs the front door banged to. The noise brought me to my senses. I turned the oil lamp down low and moved to the window. The curtains were open enough that I could see on to the driveway without disturbing them further. A figure darted across the gravel below, face hidden by a hooded top. Five-eleven, a hundred and fifty pounds. He stopped for a moment and turned towards me, looking up. I couldn’t see him clearly. I stepped back into the room and made for the stairs. But I was too slow. I opened the front door of the house on to the red glow of his tail lights, disappearing on the road to Rathduff church. A breeze picked up, carrying with it the high-pitched hum of fast tyres on tarmac. I stared hard into the night and saw above the rise of the fields the juddering flash of halogen headlights.