Tamsin giggled into his T-shirt. She loved this about Callum: that he was never a point-scorer, even when patently in the right.

* * *

On Tuesday, the first day of his fortnight’s leave, Chris Kimura was detained in Bulford by the hospitalisation of one of his men. (Nothing serious: Private Justin Cooley, too drunk to find his own pockets, had swallowed £2.77 in loose change after a win on the fruit machine.) On Wednesday morning he overslept. By the time he arrived in London, it was too late to drop off his big kitbag at Callum’s flat: he had promised to meet Doug Ronson, an old friend from Sandhurst, in the Argyll Street Bella Pasta at 6 p.m. sharp.

Doug was based at Wrexham in North Wales. As a dedicated ‘night-bomber’, this was very hard on him; shags in Wrexham were in short supply, the local girls having long since wised up to the wiles of young men with cam-cream behind their ears. Doug spent most of his free time on uniformdating.com, ‘the number one online dating site for anyone looking to date a soldier’. Women from as far away as Stoke-on-Trent were prepared to travel to Wrexham for a night of unconditional pleasure with Second Lieutenant Ronson, especially if he agreed to keep his combat boots on.

But tonight it was Doug making the journey and the effort. He had fallen not for an army-o-phile but for one of the uniforms: Helen, a lab technician at AstraZeneca. Helen’s profile picture on uniformdating.com showed her posing goofily with a test-tube, dressed in lab coat and plastic safety goggles. Doug had messaged her with a suggestive remark about what she got up to with the test-tube and had been soundly reprimanded. Compellingly, it was the banality of his humour she had objected to, not the smut. Doug was hooked; they exchanged emails, more pictures, a phone call; and three weeks later, here he was in Bella Pasta, nervously checking the garlic-festooned entrance every ten seconds to see if Helen and her friend Lara had arrived.

‘Doug, mate, relax. They’re hardly going to miss us.’ Chris gestured to his kitbag, which was propped up on a little tiled ledge right underneath the specials blackboard: the staff, suspicious of its bulk, had insisted on keeping it in full sight. ‘So tell me – what does this Laura look like?’

‘Lara. Her name is Lara. You have to get that right, or Helen’ll think I haven’t been listening.’

Chris was Doug’s wingman, there to make him look good by talking him up, or, in the event of false advertising on Helen’s part, to get him out as quickly as possible. Helen was bringing Lara for the same purpose, though there was a tacit understanding that, if all went well, the evening would turn into a double date.