‘Have a drink,’ Frank urged, and pushed my untouched pint towards me. His tone was encouraging and relaxed – which was a warning, because Frank was never relaxed. He was either for you or against you, and there was no neutral ground. His anxieties – rages, sometimes – kept mine in check: two sides of the same bad penny that cropped up in the pocket change of every off-the-books job the Brits had cashed in for over two decades. Since we’d first met on the firing line at Raven Hill back in the mid-nineties, he’d engaged me in nearly every kind of killing there was to be done, nearly everywhere on earth. In the process we’d propped each other up as guarantors of our mutual survival.

But things had changed. My perspective on his hall of mirrors had shifted.

The last job Frank sent me on – a virtual suicide mission in Sierra Leone – had unravelled badly enough for him to question the appetite of his once willing executioner. Groping for an exit that wasn’t there, I’d come back from West Africa and gone into hiding: at first in self-imposed exile as my body purged itself of the memory of the jungle; and then wherever a day’s walk would take me. I’d surfaced in the only place I could call home: the base at Raven Hill outside Belfast. Old Colonel Ellard was still running the place – his retirement postponed indefinitely after I’d declined to fill his shoes. He took me back in and put me to work on the ranges to keep me busy.

Two months later and there I was being debriefed in a pub with Frank.

It was a relief of sorts to be sitting at that table in the front room of Doherty’s – a locals’ boozer on the main drag in Ballina, a stone-skip from the salmon-torn waters of the River Moy. Behind us rows of blue and yellow flies with faded price tags gathered dust alongside unsold reels and old cane rods. The windows were half-shuttered in precaution against the prying eyes of passing wives. We both faced the door. Old habits die hard.

I’d come full circle – except that now I looked to my own defence, and, as a result, Frank to his. Sierra Leone had proved what every job had always promised: that one man is always expendable. To know that – to have lived it – and to have decided to keep at it, anyway, was neither normal nor reasonable. We both knew it. And I guessed in Frank’s eyes that made me as useful as it did dangerous. It was a fine balance, too, because no matter how dedicated the disciple, disillusionment breeds disloyalty – and Frank didn’t allow his gamekeepers to turn poacher.