‘Every officer cadet, in whichever service, has to study prior battles during their basic training, to make sure that mistakes made in the past are not repeated in the future. What happened at Rorke’s Drift is ultimately why, during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, all British infantry weapons were attached to our soldiers with webbing belts so they couldn’t simply be pulled away by the enemy and then used against us.’

I was certainly impressed by Charles’s encyclopedic military knowledge—but I still had no intention of shooting anyone with his shotgun, not unless I absolutely had to.

I spent an hour stocking up on food at Tesco before collecting Chico from Banbury railway station at noon.

It had been almost three years since I had seen him, and he had spread a little around his waist, plus he had a few more grey flecks among the dark tight curls on his head, but otherwise he looked just as I’d first seen him all those years ago at Hunt Radnor.

He lobbed his holdall onto the back seat and climbed into the Discovery next to me. I set off back to Nutwell.

‘So how was your night with the Swedish beauty?’

‘Don’t ask.’

‘Not as expected then?’

‘Have you ever seen The Crying Game?’

I looked across at him ‘No!’

‘Oh, yes. Ingrid, my gorgeous Swedish beauty. Turns out she used to be a bleedin’ Ivan.’

‘When did you find out?’ I asked, trying very hard not to laugh. ‘Don’t tell me it was only when she took her clothes off.’

‘You mean his clothes off. Seems she’s still legally a bleedin’ man. He certainly had everythin’ intact down below, just like in the film, even if he does have tits as well. It’s all very confusin’, I can tell you.’

‘My God. What did you do?’

‘What do you think I did? I made my excuses and left. Sad, though. She—he—was really nice about it. We talked for a bit before I went. Poor kid is really troubled. By the end, I felt really sorry for her—him.’

‘Will you see her again?’

‘I said I might, especially if she had the operation. Seems she’d been thinkin’ about havin’ it for a quite a while now.’

‘What a varied life you lead.’

‘You can talk. You’re walkin’ around with some dead geezer’s hand sewn onto your arm. That’s bleedin’ gruesome for a start.’

Chico clearly had an intuitive way with words.

‘How is it, anyway?’ he asked.

I took my right hand off the steering wheel and drove along holding the wheel only with my new left one. ‘It’s totally part of me now. I don’t even think about it as being different.’

‘So it’s better than that fancy electric job you had before?’

‘Much better. I can feel things with this.’