Still I hesitated. Move forward or step back. The past was a foreign country, too, and one I had much less idea how to navigate than France. I thought of my father, who for stretches of my childhood I very rarely saw; and I thought of Doc, too, who perhaps saw more of my mother than either my father or I had wanted to admit. If love for her had bewildered him until he died, then he would have died for me, too. Maybe my mother murmured his name with mine as she swept her tired child’s limbs into bed.

I’d never thought too much about love. Every man I’d killed had been some mother’s son. To dwell on that could make a strong man lose his mind. Or his soul. Even now – especially now – thinking about my mother and father, about Doc and Rachel, was like standing too close to a wall. All I could see were bricks and mortar, not what they encompassed. But there were no walls I had not scaled in the past. I would survive. And yet what was the point of survival if there was no one, least of all myself, left to love?

Get a grip on yourself, Max. You’re a fighter. So fight.

One minute.

I stepped down off the running board and put both feet on the ground. I paused and turned around, smacking into the frantic father of the family that had boarded before me, busy with a folded stroller. As his hand went out to steady himself, a rolled-up copy of The Times unfurled itself from under his arm and tumbled to the platform. I stared down at the wrinkled pages curling in the brittle air, straight into my own eyes.

The portrait was reproduced twice its original size, captioned with my name. I looked passively at the camera. No smile. Short haircut. Shave. The tip of my left ear missing. A bright, perfect print against a white background. It was my passport photograph, and it had been taken three weeks before at Raven Hill barracks. The headline above it: ‘Lone wolf’ sought over terror attack. Below the fold, in lurid colour, was a photograph of Chappie Connor’s burned-out cottage. Thatch gone, glass gone, door gone: it sat, still smoking, like a charred skull sinking into the sodden headland.

Fifteen seconds.