The warrant officer removed a sheet of burlap from a broken refueling hose and draped it over the plastic. With the help of four other men, they moved the coffin swiftly out of the plane, onto a luggage truck. Hughes was painfully conscious that the everyday noise of the airfield continued, oblivious. Once inside the cargo bay they placed it on a gurney with the box of possessions on the rack beneath it.

Hughes checked his messages and emails but there was nothing about a corpse returning. He made calls, steadily moving up the chain of command. A squadron leader radioed back, equally puzzled.

“No ID?”

“No, sir. I’d appreciate it if you could ascertain who’s responsible and notify them of the situation.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

No one came. It couldn’t stay among the cargo. Hughes remembered the gymnasium once being used as a temporary morgue—a row of nine arrivals from Helmand, stately enough on the parquet floor—and he made the decision to transfer the anonymous coffin there while they sought its owner. He enlisted the help of twenty-year-old Jack Trafford, a leading aircraftman from the specialist reserves, and they wheeled it through the back corridors together.

People stopped playing as they entered the sports courts. Games concluded and the place emptied. The two men waited.

Both were tired at the end of a long shift. Trafford had been hoping to get to the staff bar. Hughes had a six-month-old daughter at home. But the coffin lent their evening a solemnity that eclipsed those concerns. It spoke of events far away, a reminder that this was no normal airport.

Hughes radioed again. Again, a message came in: Guard it for now, someone would be tracked down.

No more flights were due in that night. The clank of gym equipment could be heard next door, occasional grunts and laughter. The negligence became an increasing source of anger for Hughes: that a corpse might become misdirected mail. The vast machine of the military was nothing if it forgot the meaning of these deliveries.

He checked the blank docket again as a morbid curiosity grew. Hughes took the knife from his belt and levered the top of the coffin open. He stood back as the gases dispersed, covered his mouth and nose with a hand.

The corpse belonged to a man in his midforties, six foot something, with long ginger hair and stubble. His eyes remained partially open but clouded. He wore shorts and a T-shirt. Nothing about him seemed military. No more than two or three days dead, Hughes guessed, but his face was blue-gray and swollen, with hemorrhaging around the eyes and also around the throat, where purple marks had begun to blacken in the shape of a ligature.