‘I mean it, Tom: I’ll never forget this.’ And with a nod they left.

Buster smiled at his friend. ‘Good work, Borat. But can we try and have a week or two now where you don’t kill anyone?’

‘Buster,’ Tom said.

‘Yeah?’

‘Fuck off.’ Tom smiled as he delivered the insult. Buster was a piss-taker, but he was a good man, a good operator, and a very good friend. He clapped Buster on the back and left the room to search for a phone.

It was a familiar urge he had after every violent contact he was involved in: he just wanted to hear his foster father, Cameron’s, voice.

The piss-taking that Tom received from comrades about his lack of emotions had caused him some reflection over the years. Tom would laugh along with his friends, but it concerned him enough to make him google the traits of a psychopath. Ticking off these traits didn’t make things any clearer, though: he wasn’t cruel, he had morals, and he believed he always wanted to protect the innocent, but he still felt nothing. Maybe all those good things were just learnt behaviours; after all, he had always followed Cameron’s mantra: ‘Always do right, boy.’

He soon found the troops’ welfare phone, a secure mobile phone that was cleared for use for personal calls, with each soldier given a limited allocation of minutes to use.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, Cameron, it’s Tom,’ he said in a cheery voice. ‘Just checking in.’

He hadn’t spoken to his foster parents, Cameron and Shona Ferguson, for a few weeks, given the humdrum chaos of deployment without action. But at that moment, with Buster’s words still ringing in his ears, it was the only thing he wanted to do.

‘Hey, son, how’s it going?’ Tom could imagine the big grin splitting his foster father’s rugged face.

‘All a bit boring here, to be honest,’ Tom said. Cameron knew not to press: an ex-bootneck himself, he knew he wouldn’t get an answer.

They talked about nothing in particular for about ten minutes, with Cameron boasting about some enormous trout he’d allegedly recently caught. As always, discussions were a front for the comfort of hearing each other’s voices. Tom rang off and stepped out into the cool air

He thought about Cameron and Shona and when they had taken him in, a scared twelve-year-old boy from Bosnia. They lived in a beautiful little farm cottage on the edge of the Cairngorm mountain range. On arrival he had felt like he’d arrived home after the fog of the city, and was happy to have left that sense of claustrophobia behind.