‘That’s right.’ Leah kept her head bowed over the dishwasher.

‘You don’t sound very excited.’

‘Mmmm.’ She shrugged, still facing away from him.

Callum was irritated by her nonchalance. He was, in a sense, her champion – one of the only people who thought of Leah as prey, not predator. Watching her slim back as she bent over the dirty plates, he saw the possibility that the other picture of her was correct. He felt abruptly uncomfortable about the encouragement he had given Chris.

‘Leah?’ he said, making no attempt to soften the school-room severity in his tone. ‘Chris is a good guy. I hope you’re not going to mess him around.’

Leah shook her head as if this were an absurd idea, smiling her gummy smile to hide a hurt that Callum saw anyway. He repressed the impulse to apologise: no harm in making her think a bit, he decided.

Then there was the date itself. Chris’s first idea was to take Leah for a simple meal at some Italian chain restaurant, then hole up in a nearby pub for the rest of the evening. But in the micro-culture of the Bulford barracks, dating plans were subject to wild inflation. The objective was to impress not the girl but your fellow officers. In fact, the best stories often involved elaborate schemes that ended in disaster. The legend of Jon Jefford, for example, lived on three years after JJ had left the army. He had proposed to his girlfriend in a hot-air balloon – an ambitious romantic gesture that went badly wrong when she turned him down, sentencing them both to two hours of windy silence, with the picnic hamper and the bottle of unopened champagne reproaching them from the corner of the basket.

Thus in the three weeks leading up to his date with Leah, Chris found himself under considerable pressure to come up with something more exotic than Bella Pasta. Despite his good looks, he was known to be hopeless with women, so the mere fact of the date attracted a good deal of genial mockery. One of the guys managed to wrest Leah’s name from him; when her Facebook page revealed her to be ‘fucking hot’, and ‘way too good for a Cro-Magnon like Crimbo’, interest in the date grew stronger still. Chris, enjoying the kudos, began to think big. By the time Saturday came round, he had an action-packed evening lined up: cocktails and animal face-painting at one of ZSL’s ‘Zoo Lates’ before supper at Dans Le Noir (a novelty restaurant that served its diners in total darkness), then on to a pop-up roller disco in a disused Bermondsey warehouse.