‘Are you dead?’ she hissed. If you found a dead person you were supposed to shout ‘Murder’, but this was the last game of the evening and she didn’t want it to end.

‘No, I’m just hiding,’ came the whispered reply.

Sophie put out a hand and touched a bony forearm. ‘Who is that?’

‘It’s Ludo. Who’re you?’ Ludo’s hand found her knee and squeezed.

‘Sophie.’

Ludo said something she couldn’t hear.

‘What?’ She put her head down to where the sound was coming from. Ludo’s mouth was right next to her cheek; she could feel his breath on her skin.

‘I’m sorry about calling you a suck earlier.’

‘That’s okay,’ Sophie whispered back.

Then Ludo tapped her on the shoulder and she cried out once and died happy, the touch of his hand on her knee still tingling long after he’d crawled away to murder Hugh.

Mr Raddock had brought his book of war poetry with him: every night, at the very end of the evening, once they had all used the bathroom and changed into their pyjamas, they gathered in the sitting area to hear someone read out a poem. Tonight it was Ludo’s turn. He read Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, clearly and well. Sophie’s eyes never left his face. The WW1 soldiers who lied about their age would only have been two or three years older than him, she thought. She imagined Ludo lying in no-man’s land with his pale face even paler than usual and dark jammy blood oozing from a hole in his head. She imagined being his girlfriend back home in England, trembling as she opened the dreaded telegram.

When Ludo read the line ‘What candles may be held to speed them all?’ she found she had tears in her eyes. It was the first time a poem had ever made her cry, she realised, feeling very proud of herself indeed.

* * *

Three days later: another reassurance patrol, the last before Chris’s multiple returned to the checkpoints. Showal Kalay was the second village on their route. Chris had been looking forward to returning to Showal: the last time he was here, he got into a heated discussion with a local trader who wanted the British troops to go home and leave the local people in peace. Since then, Chris had had time to think up a set of simply worded, sympathetic but firm defences of the British mission that he was keen to try out on the old trader. But today he felt too distracted to navigate such a sensitive debate. Ever since the incident in Mirwais with the ANP and the injured woman, he had thought of little else.