‘Trust me, it’ll all die down. Stuff like this happens all over – this could be Paris or Lyon or Marseille.’ Now he could hear the impatience in his tone. Civil strife, ethnic tensions, tribal conflicts, you name it, he’d seen it – in Benghazi, Beirut, Kinshasa, Kirkuk. In Western Europe we don’t know we’re born, he felt like saying, but that was the last thing she needed to hear.

‘Why do they keep extending you? Tell them you want to come home.’

Now it was hitting them what different worlds they occupied, what it meant to be an army fiancée – let alone a wife, if they ever got that far. Had he misled her? She knew some of the wives back in Hereford and must have heard the gripes. This was his first long job away since they had got together. It had all happened so fast: just forty-eight hours’ notice. This was how it was going to be: she had to realize that.

‘It doesn’t work like that, babe. They give the orders. I do what I’m told.’

Her face disappeared from the screen for a moment. When it reappeared she was dabbing her eyes with a tissue. ‘I keep thinking how different it could have been.’

He didn’t need to ask what she meant. First there had been the Eurostar incident. She had been so brave, standing up to the hijackers, helping him defeat them. His respect for her then was total. But it had taken its toll on her – with flashbacks, nightmares and an under-standable fear of tunnels. And then losing the baby, their baby. Their different responses to grief had opened a void between them. He knew all about loss. He could have written a book about it. But none of it was working for her.

‘Look, we’ve got the whole of our lives ahead of us. We can try again.’

It sounded weak and clichéd, but what else could he say? How could he comfort her, reassure her from a desert fortress more than three thousand miles away? The pregnancy had been a complete accident, parent-hood something he hadn’t even considered. But he’d supported her all the way, even fancied himself as potential good dad material – when he was around. But it wasn’t to be.

He had dealt with more than his fair share of death: seen mates killed, shredded, vaporized, smashed to pieces so small there was nothing to bury. But watching your own child die as it was being born, and its distraught mother turn her face away from you in grief? There was no training for that.