Sometimes he forgot why he was home – in the few days he’d been here, he’d swum at the beach and visited old friends – but in the middle of the night, as he lay sweating with only a ceiling fan for comfort, it hit him: his friends were dead, and he should be too. It was pure serendipity that he’d left the lab on Monday afternoon to speak to his mother.

Emily and Mike hadn’t been privy to the finer details of what they were doing, and so they’d had less to hide. They’d been drafted in to share the workload and carry out the tests that technicians would in any lab, while George collated and made decisions. They were keen to lend a few hours to the Squash Club for George’s sake, and in memory of his daughter. Their respect for their department head was such that they took payment sporadically and sometimes in kind. George once paid Mike’s credit card off after rifling through his wallet to find it, knowing he was over £8,000 in debt. Other than that, they worked for free.

The process was the same for any developmental drug: identify a need, then a target, then test drugs in test plates by the thousand until they got some positive results. But that was only after endorsements, reviews and approved investment. The process could take decades, and several million pounds. And that was just the beginning. After the discovery of a positive result, they had to find out why; and that was where the animals came in. They were that far down the line at the Squash Club, without the patent and approval, of course. Generally two species had to be tested, and they’d chosen rodents and a cyno monkey. The Thai meal was supposed to celebrate reaching the stage where the drug could be tested on human control groups. They all knew they had no such thing, and that George was their control group. The tests were to start officially this week, but Alex knew that George had been testing himself for weeks.

The sand on Dhekelia beach was fine and brown, and it stuck to his feet. He carried his shoes in his hand and waved to people he knew. He took a table close to the beach and kept his shoes off. The café was rammed with tourists and everybody spoke English. The owner waved at him and shouted, ‘Two minutes, Alex!’

He always had the same meal. He’d developed a taste for mushy peas in England, and Lambros prepared them in exactly the same way, including baking soda. That was why the café was such a hit with the soldiers. The barracks had changed over the years and now the soldiers came mainly unaccompanied, the British government no longer able to afford to send their families with them.